The 20-Minute Captain

The 20-Minute Captain

The most effective commander in Marita Online will play for roughly twenty minutes a day. Not because the game limits their session. Because there is nothing useful left to do after twenty minutes of good decisions.

This is a design choice. It is the design choice — the one from which most other decisions follow. We built a game that measures the quality of your thinking, not the quantity of your presence. If that sounds obvious, consider how few games have ever attempted it, and how many have built billion-dollar businesses on the opposite premise.

The Attention Tax

The standard model works like this: the game presents tasks. Tasks require time. Time investment produces progress. Progress produces the feeling of accomplishment. The more time you invest, the more progress you make, the more accomplished you feel.

This is not a conspiracy. It's an incentive structure. Games that monetize through engagement — whether via ads, microtransactions, or subscription retention — benefit when you spend more hours in the client. The design follows the incentive. Dailies, weeklies, timed events, decay mechanics, streaks. Each one is an elegant mechanism for converting your calendar into their revenue.

The result is that "competitive" in most games means "available." The player who logs eight hours outperforms the player who logs two, not because their decisions are better, but because they made more of them. Execution volume substitutes for execution quality. The guild leader who shows up for every raid outranks the one who shows up for half, even if the part-time leader reads the situation better every single time they're present.

This filters the player base. People who think for a living — who spend their working hours making high-stakes decisions with incomplete information — are exactly the people who cannot compete on availability. They have the skills that should matter. They don't have the hours. So they leave, or never start, and the games get optimized further for the people who stayed.

We think this is a waste. Not of the games industry's potential, though it is that. Of the players.

What Twenty Minutes Buys You

Here is a Monday morning in Marita.

You log in at 08:15. Your Executive Officer briefs you. Overnight, the ship completed its transit burn toward Mars — the one you authorized Friday evening. Current position: 0.3 AU out, decelerating. Fuel state: 6,100 kg of your 10,000 kg capacity. Sensors picked up two contacts during the coast phase, both logged with bearing, range, and light-delay. One is a known BC freighter on a standard Belt-to-Mars trajectory. The other is unidentified, detected via infrared at 1.2 million kilometers, light delay 4 seconds, now classified as a cold-running ship on a parallel course.

That second contact is the decision.

Your standing doctrine says to maintain passive sensors and avoid radar ping in potentially hostile space. Good doctrine — radar reveals your position before it reveals theirs. But a cold-running ship on a parallel course at 1.2 million kilometers could be a lot of things. A smuggler who doesn't want to be seen. A pirate sizing up your approach. An EC patrol running quiet for their own reasons. Or nothing — a derelict, a sensor ghost, a mining vessel with a cold reactor.

You have options. Alter course to increase separation — costs fuel you may need for Mars orbital insertion. Maintain course and increase passive monitoring — preserves fuel but accepts the risk. Break radio silence to query the contact on standard hailing frequencies — confirms your position but might resolve the ambiguity. Authorize your Tactical Officer to prepare a fire-control solution as a precaution — doesn't reveal anything but focuses crew attention.

You think about it. Maybe ninety seconds. You decide: maintain course, increase passive sensor sweep cadence, authorize TAC to prep a solution but not to go active, and instruct COMMS to prepare a hail on your explicit order only. You tell your XO. The XO acknowledges, delegates to the relevant stations, confirms readiness.

That took four minutes.

You spend another six minutes reviewing the Mars approach. Your Navigator has the orbital insertion burn calculated — 1,800 km/s delta-v, 540 kg fuel, arrival in 14 hours. The station you're docking at quotes fuel at 8 credits per kilogram. You check your credit balance, confirm the purchase math, authorize the transaction to execute on docking. You review the cargo manifest for the outbound leg. You note that ice prices at Ceres have dropped 12% since last week and flag a question for your XO to research while you're offline.

That took eight minutes.

You scan the overnight sensor logs for anything your XO didn't flag. Nothing. You review your standing orders document — the set of conditional instructions your crew follows when you're not present. You make one change: lower the threshold for waking you from "weapons fire detected" to "unidentified contact within 500,000 km," given the current tactical picture. Save. Done.

Two minutes.

You log out at 08:29. Fourteen minutes of actual session. Twenty if you include reading the brief carefully and thinking before deciding.

The ship continues. Your crew executes your standing orders around the clock. The Navigator monitors the approach. The Sensors Officer watches the unknown contact. The Tactical Officer maintains an updated firing solution. The Engineer manages thermal signature and reactor output. None of them need you to click anything. All of them need you to have decided correctly.

If the unknown contact closes to 500,000 km, your XO alerts you. Otherwise, you check in tomorrow morning. Another fourteen minutes. Another set of decisions that compound on today's.

What You're Actually Competing On

The person who beats you in Marita will not have played more hours. They will have thought more clearly.

They anticipated the Mars fuel price because they've been tracking station economics for a week, spending two minutes per day reviewing price trends that take their crew thirty seconds to compile. They positioned their ship on the profitable side of the Jupiter-Mars fuel gradient because they did the math on transit costs versus sale margins during a Wednesday lunch break. They wrote better standing orders because they thought about failure modes while commuting.

None of this happens in the client. It happens in the shower, on the train, during the walk between meetings. The game occupies a background thread in your thinking — the same thread that senior professionals already run for their actual work. What if the supplier is late? What does the competitor's hiring pattern tell us? If this deal falls through, what's the backup?

Strategic thinking is not an activity you schedule. It's a mode your brain operates in once it has the right problem to chew on. Games have always produced this — the Civilization player who lies awake thinking about their next turn, the chess player who sees board positions on the ceiling. We just built a game where that background processing is the primary competitive skill, not a side effect.

Your fourteen-minute session is the upload. You push decisions into the universe. The universe runs them against physics, against the other players' decisions, against the accumulated consequences of every choice made by every ship in the solar system. When you return, you download the results. Assess. Decide. Upload. Log out.

The crew is awake for all of it. They don't need sleep. They don't degrade with fatigue. They maintain vigilance at a level no human can sustain. What they cannot do — what no AI crew will ever do — is decide what matters. Which contact is a threat and which is irrelevant. Whether the fuel expenditure is worth the risk reduction. When to break radio silence and when to endure the uncertainty. Whether to trust the doctrine or override it because something feels wrong in a way that doesn't fit the conditional logic.

That's you. That's the twenty minutes. That's the game.

We do not believe your sense of accomplishment should be a function of hours spent staring at a screen. We believe it should be a function of the moment you log in, see that your standing orders handled the overnight contact exactly as you intended, that your fuel purchase executed at the price you predicted, that your crew is positioned where your strategy put them — and you realize the right decisions were made twelve hours ago, in fourteen minutes, before your first cup of coffee.