I was thinking about the term 'real time' and what that is taken to mean in games. It's generally used to mean continuous, unbroken time. In strategy games, it contrasts with a turn-based system, where the is the leisure of time to contemplate each move before making it, secure in the knowledge that time will not advance until you have.
(There are some vagaries, of course -- some 'real-time' strategy games will let you pause and think, or even set down instructions while the flow of time is paused.)
It's a useful term and one that has specific currency. I'm not actually disputing it here. But it's also not the only way we experience time.
I was thinking about 'real time' applied to something like Citizen Sleeper. You experience the passage of days; you decide how to spend a limited amount of energy and attention of different quality. You lay down plans and see them gradually come to fruition on longer timescales.
That is real time, for a different value of the concept. We don't just experience time with the moment-to-moment immediacy of changing lanes on a motorway -- a set of continuous inputs, decisions, and actions. We make plans, imagine future possibilities, (dwell on past annoyances, failings, or pleasures,) have to wait -- over the passage of longitudinal time -- for things to happen.
Obviously, games trying to have to create that feeling have to abstract what that looks like, to look for the feeling rather than the literal fact of the matter. (Unless you're doing something singular like THE LONGING). Games have to speed up and slow down to represent our real time.
(This thought, somewhat sidewaysly, brought about by considering hyphenation habits for 'a game in real time' vs 'a real-time game'. One of my first professional tasks (not in games) was editing a company 'book' which featured these phrases a lot.)