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

Time is central to how video games are played, monetised, and maintained – yet how developers understand and design for time is often overlooked. This study addresses that gap through twenty semi-structured interviews with international game professionals from AAA, Indie, Mobile, and Live-service studios. Using constructivist grounded theory, we develop a practitioner-informed grounded account of temporal game design as operating between organisational constraints, data infrastructures, and player engagement. We develop three core understandings informing this account: temporal design across studio contexts – how temporal priorities range across industry; tools of temporal design – the systems and metrics that collect and target player time; and data-centered temporal design – how temporal data informs game design. From this, we contribute four temporal design heuristics to help organise design decisions about how player time is structured and communicated in games and related attention-economy systems.