Designing for Presence, Not Hours
There's a lieutenant commander sitting in a closet on the Moon.
She's been "at work" for seventeen minutes. In that time she's assessed a threat contact, executed a course correction burn, logged an inconclusive intelligence observation, and handed operational control back to her AI executive officer with standing orders that will govern her ship for the next eleven hours.
This is not a failure state. This is the design working exactly as intended.
Most game design treats time as the primary resource. Not gold. Not skill. Not strategy. Time. The longer you play, the more you have. The less you play, the further you fall behind. The mechanic sounds neutral until you examine what it actually selects for: it selects for unemployment. It builds engagement models that are structurally identical to slot machine addiction, then dresses them in lore and progression bars and calls the result a "living world."
The living world is a time sink. It lives by eating yours.
There is a different model. It is harder to design and more valuable when done correctly, and almost nobody does it.
The Core Problem Is Conflating Engagement With Presence
A player who logs in for twenty minutes and makes three consequential decisions has engaged with your game. A player who logs in for six hours and performs repetitive resource loops has been present in your game. These are not the same thing, and the confusion between them is responsible for most of what's wrong with the medium.
Engagement is cognitive. It requires a real decision space — choices where the outcome is non-obvious, where prior knowledge creates genuine advantage, where the player's judgment matters more than their reaction time or their hours logged. Presence is biological. It just requires a warm body at a keyboard.
The industry optimized for presence because presence is measurable by simple metrics: daily active users, session length, return rate. Engagement is harder to quantify. A twenty-minute session that changes a player's strategic posture for the next seventy-two hours shows up in your analytics as a short session. The algorithm flags it as underperformance. The designer gets pressure to extend it.
This is the trap. Designing your way out of it requires accepting that session length is a consequence of good design, not a target of it.
Asynchronous Physics Solves What Synchronous Design Cannot
The Marita Universe design makes one structural decision that everything else follows from: the simulation runs continuously whether the player is present or not.
This sounds like it should create anxiety — the dreaded "you were away and things happened without you" mechanic that keeps mobile players checking their phones at dinner. But the anxiety version of this design is a consequence of threat without agency. Clash of Clans tells you someone attacked your village while you slept because the designer wants you to feel that logging off has costs. The game punishes absence.
Marita inverts this. Logging off has no special penalty because the simulation doesn't need you. Your ship is on a trajectory you plotted. Your standing orders are executing. The physics will be exactly where the physics should be when you return. The universe is not waiting for you and it is not punishing you. It is simply continuing, which is what universes do.
The player's relationship to time shifts entirely. You are not racing the simulation. You are directing a process that runs without your supervision, then returning to assess results and issue new direction. This is not a game loop. This is command authority.
Every executive who plays a strategy game and then puts it down because they don't have six hours understands implicitly what they're being denied. They want to make decisions. They don't want to execute them personally in real time. The gap between those two desires is exactly the space that asynchronous design fills.
Consequences Must Outlast Sessions
The standard design error is giving players meaningful things to do during sessions and nothing to think about between them. This produces engagement inside the game window and zero cognitive presence outside it — which means zero retention, zero word-of-mouth, zero identity investment in the outcome.
The inverse is correct. Design for what the player thinks about when they're not playing.
In the narrative above, Kira Mäkinen logged off with an unresolved contact. A Brasília survey ship that burned once and went cold. Sixty-one percent probability of remaining cold — which means thirty-nine percent probability of something else. She filed it as inconclusive. She went to get coffee. But the question is still open.
She will think about that contact. Not because the game is pushing a notification at her. Because the situation is genuinely unresolved and she has skin in it. When she returns at perihelion minus two hours, the answer will be there — the contact either reappeared or it didn't, and whichever is true will have been shaped in part by the decision she made to close the bearing.
This is the mechanism: actions taken in session produce consequences that manifest asynchronously, creating a forward pull that the game doesn't have to manufacture through artificial urgency. The player provides the urgency themselves because they actually care what happened.
The design question is not "how do I keep the player in the game longer." It is "what did I give the player to think about when they left."
Decision Density Matters More Than Decision Volume
A session that contains three meaningful decisions is more valuable than a session that contains three hundred trivial ones. This is obvious in the abstract and almost universally ignored in practice, because trivial decisions are cheap to design and create the illusion of engagement through sheer volume.
Hotbar management. Resource collection. Crafting queues. Travel time. These are not decisions. They are the administrative overhead of decisions that already happened, stretched into playtime to justify the session length metric. Players perform them because the game requires it, not because they want to. Removing them makes the game better. Designers rarely remove them because shorter sessions look like failure from the outside.
The Marita design makes a specific commitment here: the navigation officer plots the course, the AI crew executes the burn, and the physics simulation handles the transit. The player does not manually pilot the ship from Earth to Mercury. The player decides to go to Mercury, assesses the tactical situation on arrival, and makes consequential choices about what to do there. Everything between the decision and the consequences is handled by systems.
This is not reducing depth. This is concentrating depth. Every minute of player time is in contact with actual strategic substance rather than the procedural friction that surrounds it.
The Identity Problem: What Kind of Player Does Your Game Select For
Every mechanic is a filter. Long session requirements filter out players with careers, families, and responsibilities. Twitch mechanics filter out players over forty. Grinding filters out players who value their time relative to their progress.
These are not neutral design choices. They are active decisions about who your game is for, made implicitly rather than explicitly, which is why designers often don't realize they've made them.
The Marita design explicitly targets people who left gaming because gaming stopped respecting their time. The mechanics are not accommodations for busy people — they are the correct design for people whose strategic judgment is worth more than their hours logged. The twenty-minute session is not a concession to real life. It is the point. The player who logs in for twenty minutes, makes three decisions that will shape the next forty-eight hours of the simulation, and logs off satisfied has been given exactly what they came for.
Design for that player. Design sessions that are complete experiences at twenty minutes, not truncated versions of the six-hour experience. Design consequences that extend past the session window. Design systems that continue operating in your absence, not systems that punish it.
The lieutenant commander in the closet on the Moon is not playing a lesser version of the game because she only has seventeen minutes. She is playing the game correctly. The design made that possible by treating her time as a constraint to respect rather than a resource to extract.
That's the distinction. Extraction versus respect. Almost everything wrong with modern game design reduces to it.
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