Gameplay Beyond the Game: The Temporal Structures in Gacha Game Participation

This paper examines how gacha games, using Genshin Impact as its central case, shape and regulate players' everyday temporal routines rather than existing as isolated leisure activities. Drawing on interviews with 48 free-to-play players in mainland China conducted between October 2020 and June 2021, the author argues that daily logins, task completion, stamina management, and monthly passes embed gameplay within players' social timetables. Players commonly schedule gaming around work and personal obligations, reserve weekend time for limited events, and experience strong negative feelings when they miss expected rewards, which the author links to loss aversion.

A central finding concerns the mismatch between the currency economy and playtime. Premium currency in these games is largely accessible within the first minutes of daily play and refreshes with real-world time, so its acquisition tracks the regularity of players' routines more than the hours they spend in-game. The author illustrates this with a monthly pass that yields roughly ten times the premium currency of a direct purchase, arguing that the surplus reflects the player's sustained presence and bodily routines rather than any in-game narrative or challenge. Contrasted with the monetisation of impatience in freemium models, the game thus rewards routine engagement while players pay for instant gratification, revealing divergent temporal expectations between system and player.

The paper further proposes that players internalise the temporal logic of gacha mechanics in a manner analogous to learning a game's performative grammar, so that gameplay extends into the coordination of everyday life. Framed through the concept of pervasive games and the hybrid space of digital and physical play, the work contributes to understanding how such mechanics occupy and regulate contemporary temporal structures. The study is qualitative and limited in scope to one region and one flagship title, and the author suggests its findings may inform ethical guidelines for gacha game design.