Time is an inexorable, merciless fact in real life, unless you’re travelling at velocities high enough for relativistic effects to become noticeable (in which case this copy of Edge would be too heavy to pick up). The ever-increasing temporal pressure imposed upon the working population is in itself a major modern socio-political concern. So it is one of the great escapist joys of videogames that in them, time becomes plastic and malleable. Set up your variables in SimCity and fast-forward through months of an economic cycle to test your theories; munch a Combat Boost and execute an enfilade of perfect headshots in slow-motion.

Curious, then, that the two new Pokémon games, Silver and Gold, feature a game-time that is so closely locked to that of the real world. We have seen a few clever mirrorings of calendar time before, amusing Easter Eggs in games such as Ready 2 Rumble, where the boxing audience becomes infested with cheering skeletons if you play it on Hallowe’en. But the new Pokémon games wire this idea into the very structure of play. Some species of monster are nocturnal, so that you will only see them if you are playing after dark according to the GameBoy’s internal clock. There is even a ferry that leaves only on Wednesdays – and you actually do have to catch it on a “real” Wednesday, or wait a week until your next chance.

What are we to make of such chronological totalitarianism? The cynical view would be that it is a fiendishly clever way to turn the world’s children into sleep-deprived, schoolwork-shunning zombies. But if that succeeds, there won’t be any affluent, high-earning adults able to buy GameCubes. The entire next generation of videogamers, having wasted their youths on bizarrely compelling 2D nurturing games, will be spending their days instead ranting on park benches and peering into discarded Sainsbury’s bags. The industry will go bust.

So if evil brainwashing isn’t the main aim, why else introduce such restrictions? Well, in one way, it seems like a logical way to extend the concept of gameworld persistence. Games have already engineered the illusion of a storyline that continues to evolve in places far from where your character currently is: Half-Life, for example, very cunningly lets you happen to “notice” pre-scripted events. The advantage of such a technique is to make the player feel as though she is not just controlling a game, but participating in a larger, quasi-cinematic process – being an actor in a dramatically interesting virtual world.

And then there is the paradigm of “real-time”. Old-fashioned twitch videogames, of course, always were real-time productions: Asteroids and Defender packed the seconds with purely kinetic play, as do today’s racing and beat-’em-up productions. But Metal Gear Solid was also approximately realtime in both its storyline – one 12-hour stealth mission – and its action sequences.

So what about a style of narrative adventure game in which the fictional action unfolds exactly according to the clock minute? This is a seductive gimmick already toyed with by other artforms. It can be approximated in novels, such as Henry Sutton’s recent Flying, which is supposed to take the same amount of time to read as it does to fly from London to New York and back – and that is just what the book’s characters are doing. In films, the most famous example is Hitchcock’s Rope; realtime action also features in Mike Figgis’s recent Timecode, and three times over in the brilliant German film Run Lola Run. There, Lola mysteriously seems to learn from her previous mistakes when the clock winds back for her to try again: a Groundhog Day-style idea that has now cropped up in The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, which takes place in what we might term “accelerated realtime”.

So the next step would indeed seem to be a game where it appears that stuff carries on happening even when you’re not playing. The illusion of a persistent world that chugs along according to its own internal laws would then be greatly increased. Massively multiplayer games such as Ultima Online do evolve exactly in this way regardless of the absence of any one individual contributor. To simulate such world autonomy in a solo game is likely therefore also to increase the sense of a gameworld populated by other wills, other consciousnesses than your own.

But this also necessarily limits our freedom. Why should a game be locked so arbitrarily to one axis of real-world physics when everything else about it is so seductively fantastic? For a start, it would rule out the kind of widescreen, globe-trotting storyline that games such as Goldeneye or Final Fantasy boast. Just as the classical Aristotelian unities of drama that became fashionable in 17th-century England were eventually dropped again because of their choking restrictions (the action of the play had to happen in one location over a timespan of no more than 24 hours), the temporal concertinas that we observe in epic games and, of course, films – where we cut from one day or week to the next in a fraction of a second – are a function of dramatic efficiency: they enable the director to pack more interesting stuff in without dwelling on the boring bits.

The proper beauty of a videogame is precisely that it is so independent from the quotidian irritations of real life. A game that slavishly parallels real calendar time becomes a task to be timetabled along with those of school or work. The glory of videogaming ought still to be that it allows you to escape from time, to pack a week’s worth of imaginary adventuring into a couple of hours. There’ll be time enough to worry about what day it is later.