lol nice eet. The sad reality to that is once you look at a clock (i have one near my computer) it makes you think, "wow, i play waay too much. I'm depressed." Ironclad does not want you depressed. They want you as happy as can be (so they can get you to buy the expansions).

Yeah, but I don't have any hand-dandy wall-space where I could just glance over at it. I have to turn my entire body around to look behind me

You could always just alt+tab, it doesn't pause the game.

Gentlemen,

Would an alarm be better? Set the alarm to go off after so many hours of play or at a certain time. That way you would not forget to eat or sleep, since failure to do either could negatively impact your game play and ultimately trigger you reaching your mortality frontier.

An alarm vs a clock would also not impact the "suspension of belief" during game play by constantly reminding you of everything else you are supposed to be doing instead of playing the game, which will proabably be very addictive in its final form.

It could even have the equivalent of a "snooze option" to allow you just a few more minutes before sleep, or wake you up if you have fallen asleep playing the game so that you can witness that during the long period of inactivity all your planets have fallen to pirate sieges!   

You could always play in windows mode...hence the clock would be available at the bottom...top or side on the task bar. Or... stay on the website a lot so that you get the time at the bottow of the web site. Of course.. that is in EST.. and having to figure the time out each time I look at it would really curb the amount of time I would have to play.

Maybe there could be a time elapse technology that you could research in game