Pausing

If you are a gamer, here's a question for you: what actions you like to do most in a video game? For example - if you were playing Mario, are you the kind of person who stomps on every enemy you can stomp on? (I do this all the time.) Or are you the kind of person who runs off every edge to see if there's a hidden secret? (My partner does this all the time.)

Recently, I discovered something else I had been doing all the time in video games that I haven't thought about before (even after playing video games for decades): I pause and/or open the menu. I pause in City Skylines. I pause in Project Highrise. I pause in Stardew Valley. I pause in RimWorld. I pause in Two Point Hospital.

What do I typically do when I pause? First, I breathe. Then, I plan. Where do I want my commercial zones in relation to my industrial and residential zones in my city? Where do I want to put my restaurants in a building so that I won't get complaints from other tenants? How do I want to arrange my farm plots and sprinklers so that my one scarecrow can protect all the crops? How do I arrange all the rooms so that my colonists don't get upset because they "ate without a table"? Which nurses should I put in the different treatment rooms to maximize the treatment success rate?

I don't like it when I can't pause when I'm in a multiplayer game. I really don't like timed battles. I especially panic in those situations when you need to escape from a castle that's going to burn down in 3 minutes or something and the timer is ticking and you open the menu to pause but you notice that THE TIMER IS STILL TICKING.

It dawned on me that I've been "racing against the timer" for the past couple years (e.g. a surprise deadline in 3 hours on something I have not worked on or even seen before), and that was one of the reasons why I was not feeling well overall. Of course I can't pause real life like the way I can pause in a video game, but I noticed that following my wanting-to-pause-and-plan instinct to be healthy for me.

Do you like pausing? Or do you prefer real-time?