From Quarters Per Minute to Daily Quests and Seasons: Developer Perspectives on Temporal Design in Video Games

Paper Title

From Quarters Per Minute to Daily Quests and Seasons: Developer Perspectives on Temporal Design in Video Games

Publication Info

• Topic area: Temporal design practices in video game development and their implications for player engagement.
• Keywords: Temporal design, video games, player engagement, retention, attention economy, data-driven design, user experience, dark patterns, game development, HCI.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Temporal design in video games is underexplored, particularly from the perspective of developers. Existing research focuses on player-facing systems or academic interpretations, leaving a gap in understanding how developers conceptualize and implement temporal structures.
• Significance: Temporal design shapes how games are played, monetized, and sustained, influencing player engagement and retention. Understanding this process is critical for ethical design and balancing commercial and user-centered goals.
• Motivation and related work: Prior work in HCI and game studies has examined time as a design material and cultural concern but has largely overlooked the production-side practices that shape temporal structures. This paper builds on these foundations by investigating how developers negotiate temporal design within organizational and market constraints.

Solution

• Proposed approach: A grounded account of temporal game design based on semi-structured interviews with 20 game developers from AAA, Indie, Mobile, and Live-service studios.
• Novelty:
  1. Development of a grounded theory of temporal game design as a practice-based mediation between organizational constraints, data infrastructures, and player engagement.
  2. Identification of three core categories: Temporal Design Across Studio Contexts, Tools of Temporal Design, and Data-Centered Temporal Design.
  3. Articulation of ethical tensions between user-centered and data-centered temporal design.
  4. Proposal of four temporal design heuristics for structuring and communicating player time.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with developers from diverse studio contexts.
  • Applied constructivist grounded theory to analyze how developers organize and negotiate temporal design.
  • Synthesized findings into three interrelated categories and derived practical heuristics for temporal design.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Temporal design varies across studio types, shaped by organizational pressures, market positioning, and player expectations.
  • Developers use tools like analytics platforms, telemetry systems, and data warehouses to track and model player behavior over time.
  • Data-centered temporal design optimizes player time for retention and monetization, often at the expense of player autonomy.
  • User-centered temporal design prioritizes player flexibility, autonomy, and respect for time as a lived resource.
• Advantage over baselines: Provides a practitioner-informed framework that bridges gaps between academic interpretations and real-world design practices. Highlights ethical considerations often overlooked in data-driven approaches.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Sample included developers from AAA, Indie, Mobile, and Live-service studios across Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia.
  • Analysis revealed tensions between creative intent, commercial goals, and ethical considerations in temporal design.
  • Findings were validated through iterative coding and cross-referenced against participant accounts.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Geographical concentration in Western regions; future research should include non-Western and non-English-speaking contexts.
  • Limited direct user feedback; future studies should explore player experiences of temporal design.
  • Need for deeper exploration of temporal design within specific studio contexts (e.g., Mobile vs. AAA).

Summary

This study develops a grounded account of temporal game design by analyzing 20 interviews with developers across AAA, Indie, Mobile, and Live-service studios. It identifies three core categories—Temporal Design Across Studio Contexts, Tools of Temporal Design, and Data-Centered Temporal Design—highlighting how organizational pressures and data infrastructures shape player-facing temporal structures. The study also reveals ethical tensions between user-centered and data-centered approaches and proposes four temporal design heuristics to guide ethical and effective design decisions. These findings contribute to HCI research on time, datafication, and dark patterns, offering practical insights for designing systems that respect and optimize player time.