"Real Time Games"

Unfortunately when you mention games that involve a "real time" element, many people associate them with the likes of FarmVille style "Cow Clickers". Where to get a reward you have to wait long periods of time, only to do the same thing over again.

I personally think there is quite a large amount of potential in games which involve an element of real time. For instance Animal Crossing, a game I've personally never owned but one I like very much; makes good use of routine, seasons, an open-ended nature and real time events to make the world seem more real and interesting.

As someone who is very fond of games and hopes to be very much involved with the industry in the future,  I think of many ideas for games. Some good, some bad. I've often shied away from telling anyone my ideas, with the worry they'll get "stolen". I've recently decided this is a stupid way to go about things, as said by TotalBiscuit and many others the games industry is hugely iterative. Helping each other is one of the best things we can do to makes games more compelling.

So here's my idea for a game, involving many elements I mentioned about "real time" before.

Walking through the street, a man yells and runs up to you, the distraction of his putrid odour and big shaggy beard leads you to miss everything he mumbles. Everything except for the last thing he says: "Meet me by the inn, tomorrow at midnight".

If this scenario happened in say, one of the elder scrolls games, that NPC would be simply waiting there every day at midnight. You would find the location, press the corresponding key or button, wait until midnight and then talk to him. What if you couldn't do that? What if you had to play the game at midnight and then walk to the appropriate place in-game to actually meet him? Many people would claim that's a dumb idea, but hear me through. Lets say as the player, you forget or can't be bothered to meet the NPC at that time or place, but you decide to go to the inn the next day. To your horror you find your smelly, shaggy beard friend dead on the floor.

What I'm getting at here, is imagine if quest story-lines kept on going whether the player intervened or not. You could do this without a real time aspect sure, but the addition of real time would mean players are forced to not be very involved in some quests, which is paramount to the general experience of a game like this.

Anyway, thank you for reading this post on a few of my ideas, of course implementing this into a game wouldn't be easy at all. The disadvantages will be something I go into in another one of these posts, as it shares some of the same problems as cow clickers.

Please express your opinion about this, is this a terrible idea, am I crazy?

Adiós!