Stop “Respecting My Time”

Respect my choices

For years now, my friends and I have been getting together almost every evening in an MMO. Right now it’s Bitcraft. We chose the world built by Clockwork Labs because of many smart game design decisions that Pax Dei — where we'd spent over a year before — was missing.

Freeform settlement building — even entire empires that need residents and developed infrastructure. A meaningful land-claim system where upkeep actually matters. The need for roads and sea routes to move gathered resources and other cargo. A crafting system where no single resource or crafted item ever becomes obsolete. Different resources in different regions, encouraging trade and transport. A teleport network based on player-built settlements. All of this is what we’d dreamed of seeing in Pax Dei but never got, even after several years.

For all these strengths, Bitcraft has one enormous downside: this world insists that it respects our time.

This unexpected generosity works as follows: many activities — gathering resources, processing them, crafting items — take a very long time. While your character is locked in a looping animation, pantomiming productivity, the actual player has nothing to do. And so you end up with free time away from the game during the very period you chose to spend playing it.

The more your character develops their crafting skills, the more they need to gather, process, and craft. The amount of time you can’t actually play keeps growing.

I won’t speculate on why Bitcraft’s developers chose to set things up this way, but from a player’s perspective, the result is deeply strange. If, as Sid Meier famously put it, gameplay is a series of interesting decisions, then Bitcraft gives us a series of drawn-out waiting periods between each decision and its outcome.

All of this is framed as a contrast — a game for people who have a real life.

The problem is that this approach produces exactly the opposite situation: on one hand, I’m constantly being pulled out of the game, but on the other, I have to keep in mind that in five, ten, or thirty minutes I’ll need to come back to make the next decision.

That’s the last thing I’d call respecting my time. And what is that phrase even supposed to mean?

Would I want to open a book whose author announces in the preface that they have no intention of captivating me — because they respect my time and don’t want to get in the way of my chores? If I didn’t want to read the book, why would I have bought it?

When I choose how to spend my leisure time, I’m perfectly capable of managing my own schedule. What I’d like is for the developers to respect me — not my time as something separate from my desire to spend it the way I want. I also choose an MMO as a space for connecting with other people. And here, time becomes the critical factor.

We don’t actually live in the game, and everyone knows this. So each of us logs in whenever it’s convenient. Our online hours are never in sync. That means it takes real time just to meet, get to know someone, or reconnect.

This is the essence of the “Third Place” concept, and MMOs are ideally suited for it. But can a world where we spend half our time AFK really serve as that kind of place?

In Bitcraft, I’m constantly distracted. I tab out to other windows during the forced downtime, or walk away from the computer entirely. Even if I’m in voice chat, my attention is usually not in the game and not really with my friends. I’m reading something, watching something, doing something else. I miss what my friends say and keep asking them to repeat themselves. Often the chat falls silent altogether, because there’s simply nothing to discuss in the context of what’s happening in the game. We have no activity — only patient waiting for a result.

If I spot a new character in my settlement, there’s a good chance they’re busy with some task while the player behind them is AFK. Any attempt to chat or introduce myself will most likely go unanswered.

In the end, I’ve spent my time in an MMO where I came to connect with other people — and gotten nothing of the sort. Does that look like respecting my time?

I think this phrase is nothing more than a marketing trick. But beneath the surface, it builds tolerance for abandoning a game’s core obligations: to engage, to create emotion, to fulfill its purpose. You can skip all of that — but respectfully.

What makes Bitcraft’s case paradoxical is that it actually implements a whole suite of civilization-building systems. Players start on untouched territory spanning enormous continents. They build settlements wherever they choose, develop them, try to attract other players, lay down roads, and establish trade. Pulling all of this off required the developers to build dozens of interlocking systems — and push them far beyond what any competitor has attempted.

All of this potentially powerful social engine crashes against one fundamental system that governs most processes here: long, meaningless waiting with nothing for an actual person to do.

I’m not asking for every second in an MMO to be filled with adrenaline. That’s neither possible nor desirable in this genre. I enjoy sitting by a campfire and chatting about nothing while someone repairs their gear. I enjoy a long journey through dangerous territory where half the pleasure is the road itself, not the destination. But in those moments, I’m present. I’m there, with people, in a world we share.

Bitcraft too often asks me to be absent. And calls it respect.