Many comics and even more novels make the "real life" of their stories, game like.
And a almost puzzling (even though I suspect I know exactly why) inverse phenomenon happens where stories actually set in a game attempt to treat it like real life. It's really bad when the story is suppose to be in front of a ordinary computer playing a ordinary MMORPG, since the gap is so big.
But it's nearly as bad when they use the cop out unknown futuristic virtual reality technology concept. I don't mean some goggles and finger covers that track your movements and translate that into the game screen directly in front of your eyes. I mean some kind of, it's tapping into our brain stem in a scary way and you can feel pain, taste things etc. imaginary technology. Well they really don't get into the details of these technologies, it just conveniently works to make everything like real. And I say nearly as bad as the regular computer one because the regular computer ones tend to remember it's suppose to be a game more, where as the cop out future tech ones also seem to forget it's a game more and get lazy about bridging the gap.
Now Only sense online is better than many. No "death is real" shit etc. No AI's are the same as humans, it acknowledges they are just programmed devices, mostly. Other aspects that this one remembers it's a game fairly regularly.
But the bonus event accelerated time camping arc really broke that by it's nature. How it should have been done, is just accelerate the actual world. Like in game you should be able to see the sun shadows traveling across the ground in real time. Just make everything happen faster aside from slow down for combat, and or time leaps. Like you have 20 minutes before time leaps ahead 2 hours which changes the monsters around you and anything else time related, including hunger etc. Or possibly break the event up into bits, where people can log in during set times do part of the event, limited to no time acceleration at all.
But what it seems to have done is make the game accelerate your mind. I mean supposedly minutes will feel like hours to you during the event, and you would be experiencing and making hours worth of decisions in minutes time. This goes way beyond the typical "your brain is jacked into our system" bit. Now it's "your brain is jacked into our system and we got you on speed times 200(or whatever number)!" When I try to think of the danger that would entail, it boggles my mind.
If this system works that well, I'm surprised it isn't used for everything, schooling for one. You could learn massive amounts of data with this accelerated mind bit. Work for another, have robots control actually physically getting things done, but be connected via accelerated mind and have the robots move at accelerated speed to match the mind. Hell, you could just live in virtual reality and have tubs connected for nutrition. I mean you could experience 200 times what you would outside of it, it would be like living 200 times longer (or whatever the number was)
But it got especially stupid when it came to sleep. My god, just skip sleep! (in the game) Are you saying the virtual reality system pumped participants full of tranquilizers to knock them out to simulate sleep, then minutes latter pumped them full of anti-tranquilizers to wake them up, all to simulate sleep?!? Well the alternative when it comes to brain jacking is even scarier, the brain jacking forcefully changes your brain into sleep mode and then back out minutes latter.
"It's just a story, it doesn't have to be all that accurate." But there was so many ways of doing this that would have avoided these issues, including simply actually having the event last days. The event could have ended during game night allowing people to log out and actually rest. Time jumps with real time where the event isn't happening for people to do work, school, etc. But no, the author really wanted to make it like actual camping in the game, including describing waking up in game. And the author wanted a excuse where the playing field was level with all participants where real life wouldn't cut people out. (though lots would be left out if say they couldn't log in during the relatively small window of a couple hours or whatever) In order to describe one experience of waking up in game, to make the story seem like real camping, and in a attempt to solve one problem that wasn't that big a problem, the author created many more problems.
In short, it didn't need to be like this!