One of the many side projects I have going is a MUD written in Python. I want to incorporate some sort of semi-realistic concept of time into this game; activities, like crafting, should take time, billboards and announcements in the game world should expire after some time, time-limited festivals should be held, etc. However, having in-game time correspond exactly to real life time would be undesirable. So, we have a problem.

Let's look into what I have in mind for the game in greater detail, first. There are really two separate problems we need to tackle: short timespans and long timespans. In the end I would like these two to be consistent, and one might argue about whether they are truly qualitatively different or not, but for now we will assume that they are. As a matter of fact, many if not most existing games make this distinction anyway.

Short timespans are for things like combat, spellcasting, and some forms of crafting. Many classic role-playing systems, such as d20, use a combat turn system for these timespans. You generally don't want to specify that "an attack takes 3.2 seconds" or "casting that spell takes 4.5 seconds" in a setting where most of the calculations are being made by humans on graph paper. That sort of heavy book-keeping leads to errors and will quickly drain any fun out of the game.

Instead, you have combat turns, and easy to remember rules like "you get one attack per round unless you're too busy doing other things", and then the turns just proceed in more or less the same way. Finally we decide that a round is about 6 seconds of game time, and we're good to go. Of course, this doesn't work for longer timescales; you wouldn't want to measure the time the travelling circus is in town in combat rounds.

So in addition to a short timespan, we have to consider longer timespans. Now, in traditional pen and paper games, this is straightforward, since you can pretty much accelerate or slow down time as the game master chooses, generally with the consent of the play group. It's simply enough to say that the circus will be in town for a week and be done with it. There is no real correlation between real time and game time in tabletop games.

Of course, we're dealing with computers. A computer can easily work out the details of one attack taking 3.2 seconds and another taking 4.5 without resorting to combat rounds. Many computer games still use them, especially d20 adaptations, for various reasons; maybe because that's what people are used to, or because it makes the math easier for humans to follow, or in order to stay true to the source material. For whatever reason, we don't have to, and I'm going to opt not to.

But here's where our problems begin. It's easy enough to say that an attack takes, say, 3 seconds. It's an arbitrarily chosen number, but it's in the ballpark. But... are we talking real-life seconds or in-game seconds? Presumably, we mean in-game seconds, because that's how long the attack is going to take. But as already alluded to, in-game seconds don't correspond to real-life seconds.

This may not be immediately obvious, so let's explain why. Imagine that one second in-game corresponds to one second in real life. Thus, a day in the game is a day in real life; a year in the game is a year in real life. It doesn't sound that bad until you consider the implications.

Perhaps most problematic is travel time. Moving between locations in a game world like a MUD is generally done by just entering "north", "west", or whatever other direction you want to go, which takes you to another "room" nearby. This process is generally instantaneous, because, well, no one wants to wait the 10 seconds of real time it would take to actually walk over to their destination. In other words, we ignore the time it would actually take to travel between rooms for convenience purposes. This is especially important if you want to implement ship travel, for instance; no one in their right mind would stand for waiting several real life months to travel somewhere by ship.

Another problem arises with activities like crafting. Say, for instance, that we want to try out our brand new Cooking skill and bake a cake. In real life, a simple cake is about half an hour of work plus half an hour or so of oven time, for a total of about an hour. Can you imagine spending an hour in-game just waiting for a single damn cake to finish? I know I wouldn't; that's just not fun, and thus not good game design.

So, maybe we shouldn't be pretending like an hour in game is an hour in real life. Maybe we can compress time, so that an hour in game time is only a few minutes in real life, making the process a lot more bearable; in essence, we're linearly scaling down how long things take to make things more comfortable for the players. An hour in real life can be six hours in the game, making a day four real-life hours. A few days in real life might correspond to a month in the game. Or indeed, any other scaling we like can be made to work.

Disaster strikes; this doesn't work either. Remember our combat rules? Those 3 seconds (game time) it takes to make an attack against a foe has now been compressed down to a mere 0.5 seconds (real time), meaning battle is going to be over way before the player even has a chance to react. But hey, maybe we can get away with it anyway; perhaps people's suspension of disbelief is enough to allow for an attack to take 3 seconds (real time). Maybe 3 seconds isn't that realistic anyway.

Of course, there's still the problem of indicating time to the players. Say that we're petitioning a priest for a blessing in the game, and he tells you to come back in 5 days (a holy day, you see) for the blessing. He means 5 days of in-game time, of course... which is about 20 hours from now in reality. Making this conversion is quickly going to confuse people; not to mention it's nothing but meaningless rote work which should not be imposed on players in the first place. And once you get to bigger timescales, like months or years of game time, it's only going to get worse.

All right, so maybe compressing time isn't the answer either. But what is? Can we find some lucky middle ground? Should we discard notions of having consistent timescales at all, and hope that people's suspension of disbelief will always be enough to cover any discrepancies? After all, any player would already have to exercise it thoroughly to believe many of the things that take place, such as instant room travel.

Thoughts?