Comment by lifeisstillgood

I understand it as the game can adjust the time behaviour of NPCs to improve the players experience. If you are a spy who needs to meet your contact at the cafe at 1pm then getting delayed by an interesting side quest and arriving at 1:20, in the real world you screwed up and your mission is done. If you do that in a game then it’s boring and you probably won’t realise and wait hours at a cafe. Instead the NPC can simply arrive 20 minutes late. There were games then that had the real world clock approach and would be hard to play - I think for monkey island he actually built a scheduler to avoid this