> I was recently introduced to the game Rust. In chat within a server a player asked "How do I keep my base from being destroyed when i'm offline?", the answer that the crowd provided him was "Set your mobile to alert you when your base detects people near it.".

About twenty years ago there was this german browser game "Ogame" (It's still around, but I have no idea how it works nowadays). I was looking for my scifi gaming fix, found "Ogame", decided to try it out and encountered the o so usual game mechanics for the first time: Timers, timers timers. Everything took time. from minutes, to hours to days. I noticed on my first day, that even to have modest progress I would have to set my alarm clock at arbitrary times to start the next "process".

But it gets even worse. You build your fleet and the only mechanic to not have it destroyed by random other players while you are not around is to send it travelling from one star system to another. So you had to set an additional timer/alarm clock. Not just to progress, but to avoid having all your progress taken from you.