I've got kids, if I'm playing while they're up I have to be able to drop everything on a dime to go stop them from managing to kill themselves because that happens about 3x an evening

There's several games I'd like to play but simply don't because I cannot pause. Like I get it, single player is just booting up the multiplayer server without networking so only you can join, but also it's only a single player so they should be able to pause the engine whenever they want to