121. What is a "Turn Based" Game?

I define this historically, structurally, and physiologically. Most importantly, I explain why not knowing could be catastrophic for game developers as it will affect revenues.

I recently bought Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. For the rest of this paper I will call this game “E33”. I bought it because I saw so many influencers describing it as a breakthrough in turn-based gaming from a “AA” studio. I’m a huge fan of turn based gaming going back to when I was 5 years old playing chess competitively. I even had the mind blowing honor of assisting Sid Meier on his two online Civilization games (CivWorld and Civilization Online), when 2K tried to make these into Games as a Service (GaaS).

I posted a negative review of E33 after almost 3 hours (because there was so much video prior to hitting the gameplay) because this is not a turn based game and I felt that I was sold the game under fraudulent conditions. But, it will make for what I hope is a useful paper and it is a tax write-off.

Definition

A turn based game is one where the player (and there may be more than 1) submits all of their orders for a “Turn” and submits them to the entity processing those turns. Today that’s typically a computer. After all the orders are processed (from all players) the results are returned to the player. The game assets (for everyone) are updated. Then the process repeats on the next turn.

History

Hundreds of years ago we would play turn based games like chess and checkers on a board. While “winning” was a goal of play, typically the real reason to engage in these games was the inherent social interaction with another person.

As more advanced/complex board games were invented, this social layer could become larger and more nuanced. Diplomacy by Avalon Hill comes to mind, as I played this in the game club at my junior high school almost every day. We got pretty hardcore about this game. The game actually came out in 1959 prior to my birth, but the design is so elegant that I consider it a key milestone in game design. The inclusion of simultaneous turns was also novel, though today computers make this much easier to implement.

Larger games slowly became available through Play by Mail. (PBM). This allowed dozens of people to submit turns to a game and then wait a week or so for the results to come back. I got heavily into PBM competition in my teenage years, rampaging until someone leaked my age to my opponents. They were able to force me out of competition by launching dozens of fake attacks against me, but forcing me to pay $3.50 USD per report, a fortune back then. Hints of Pay to Win to come 20 years later.

For me the release of Civilization in 1991 changed my life. This iconic game by Sid Meier had everything, it even modelled climate change way ahead of its time. The game is on its 7th iteration now, and I’ve been a bit critical of the latest version.

Key Characteristics

These games have always been popular because they have no stressful elements (other than trying to figure out how to avoid losing) and do not proceed without your permission. Thus they can be played on the go, or at home while doing other activities that are likely to interrupt you.

It is potentially possible to have turn based games with hundreds or even thousands of players acting simultaneously. Balancing a game like this is harder than a fast action game where you can adjust the difficulty just by changing the gameplay speed. If the game is progressive and/or economic, the biggest problem they have is that compounding effects mean that the player can get too powerful too fast and break the game difficulty. Trying to solve this led the Civilization VII team to make some poor design decisions. No doubt it is very difficult to solve this problem, but if you can’t do it, better to just admit that.

What turn based games don’t have is fast action or any other adrenalin based activities. Those are diametrically opposite to what a turn based game is. I will go into much more detail when I start to talk about the biochemical properties of turn based vs. fast action games. But first let’s address the misinformation about this title.

Misleading Marketing

The team at Sandfall Interactive (or possibly the publisher Keplar Interactive) has been promoting this game as turn based. Influencers have just parroted this without challenging the designation at all. People have been running with it without giving it much thought. Here is what the Steam page says:

The sequence of play is that you give each of your characters an order, then a fast action sequence begins that determines if your order works or not. Then your opponent will start their own action sequence and your performance in a fast action minigame determines if you take damage and how much.

The gameplay is not “turn based” on any level. It is action based and that action happens in a sequence of turns. If I paused Tetris every 60 seconds, that would not make Tetris turn based. The decisions you make at the start of an action sequence have very little effect on the gameplay. If I chose the worst possible option every turn, but got all the fast action sequences correct, I would just walk though the game with no challenge. If I made the best possible decision every round but failed at the action sequences, I would take full damage and would not make it far in the game.

Since the rewards after each battle are determined by your fast action performance (100%) and not your between round choices (0%), you also rapidly enter a negative compounding interest situation. The kind that would get you steamrolled in a turn based game, the opposite of the problem that plagues turn based games like Civilization.

Slay the Spire is an example of a hardcore turn based game (zero action sequences) where you are expected to get into a negative compounding power situation and die before getting to the boss. It compensates for this by progressively giving you more perks after each failure to make it easier to eventually succeed.

In E33, you aren’t expected to fail. You are expected to get good at the action sequences. It doesn’t matter if you get good at the end of round choices, they don’t really matter that much. Once you figure out what is “best” on those choices, you will just repeat them each battle.

Physiological Properties

A turn based game is very relaxing. There are no significant surprises and the pleasure comes from overcoming challenges with cognitive ability. Thus you would expect that regular play of these games would make a person smarter. “Use it or lose it” applies to all parts of your body, including your brain. If the game requires math ability, then the player is going to be practicing their math for hours and improving or maintaining their math and problem solving skills.

If the player wants to do something relaxing before sleeping every night, these sorts of activities are perfect. You want to lower your serum adrenaline levels prior to sleep. This is also why you should not use other stimulants like coffee prior to sleeping.

Engaging in a fast action game, especially one where you are not warned how many times you will have to push a button in a sequence (like in E33), force the release of a lot of adrenaline. This will definitely wake you up and make you more alert. I talk a lot about why that is bad in my The Physiology of Gaming paper.

In modern society social media is programmed to threaten you to cause the same effects. Thus thumbnails on videos have very dramatic language. Notification bells are designed to be extremely distracting (ie threatening). Games and apps designed to force you to release dopamine will also force the release of adrenaline.

The reason for this is because dopamine is released to reward you for surviving a threatening situation. A boring situation does not release dopamine. Dopamine has feedback systems that reduce the reward every time that threatening activity is repeated. This protects you from addiction. Modern tech allows you to keep hammering your reward systems and bypass your natural protections. The result is addiction.

You don’t become resistant to stress (ie adrenaline) from exposure. You actually get more vulnerable to stress if you experience too much of it. Exercise can cause adrenaline release, but it also triggers physical adaptations that help you handle stress. Apps (games, social media) that threaten you give you the stress (bad) but not the beneficial adaptations. Over time this causes progressive damage.

Your body will try to warn you that you are in trouble. If you ignore those signs, perhaps because you are engaging in a competitive game or social media argument, cortisol will be released and you will progress towards the pleasant sounding sequence of General Adaptation Syndrome.

The last stage, “Exhaustion”, ultimately leads to death if not discontinued.

I know this first hand because the GAS neuroscience work I did at UCLA in 1989 involved “exhausting” over 2000 rats. When I realized by reading my team’s reports that I was involved in the killing of over 2000 rats, I exited a promising career in neuroscience research. The games we are making now do a very good job of simulating what we did in those laboratories that you don’t hear about.

I explain this process in gaming in my I’m Dying to Play paper and detail what I believe to be the mechanism of death in competitive esports when this occurs. Because it does occur. I avoided this fate by training in parallel, and also being very careful to avoid any stimulants and to force fluids. This is the opposite of the behavior I observe modern esports athletes engaging in.

That doesn’t mean I escaped my competitive esports phase unharmed. I have permanent endocrine damage and work hard to avoid raising my adrenaline levels. Sure I have almost bullet time reflexes, but I can get very sick if forced to use them. Now I live like a Buddhist monk, hang out and talk with monks regularly, and try to live as boring a life as possible.

I don’t expect any modern esports athletes to live to my age, but if they do they will have to deal with similar consequences. Even Olympic athletes suffer permanent damage from their training, which is less harmful over time than esports activity.

Children

The youngsters like excitement. They are also able to handle a lot of it. That doesn’t mean you should expose them to modern versions that are designed to simulate deadly combat. The human body is not designed to “almost die” over and over, especially in early childhood. It absolutely adapts to this permanently, and this can even trigger epigenetic activation would could cause genetic damage that can be passed down to that child’s children. I talk a bit about this in The Physiology of Gaming.

As a parent, this damage might be invisible to you, but it’s quite real and it builds up over a lifetime. Dopamine is one hell of a drug (Richard Prior said something similar). And addictive drugs can be used to push merchandise, or even be the merchandise. The treat cycle essential for dopamine release causes a lot of adrenaline to go into the bloodstream. Prolonged release (such as in esports) causes cortisol release, which is very dangerous and an element of end stage GAS.

E33, from what I have seen so far, is quite beautiful and the opponents look really threatening. This should result in really premium dopamine releases, which might be needed for someone that’s already adapted to other dopamine stimulants and may need a hardcore source. Thus I can see why jaded game journalists are gushing over it. Most gaming influencers are 20 to 30 years younger than me. When the symptoms of abuse hit them, they won’t recognise them, and they won’t know that their time for a career change has come.

Modern humans are addicted to pleasure. Influencers promote pleasure. The ways you can get it today often didn’t exist 20 years ago or ever in the history of humans. Research has a delay of 10 to 20 years. The results are coming in and they aren’t pretty. When Facebook did their own internal research on the subject, they were quick to bury their own alarming data.

And this wasn’t the first time. Facebook did earlier experiments on 700,000 children without consent 7 years earlier in 2014. They apologized for it then just did it again. The data is very solid, multi source, and reproducible. If you are hearing these things for the first time from me, then that tells you a lot about how much control your news sources have over your life.

Monetisation

Let me take a moment to ignore all of the health, ethics, and (soon) legal consequences of lying about your product. Let’s talk money. There is a market for high dopamine products (like action games). There is a market for relaxing turn based games. The target demographics in each case are not the same. Putting every game mechanic imaginable in your game will not make it appeal to everyone. It could end up turning off everyone.

People buy specific genres of games because they have varying needs. They won’t understand those needs on the level I use in my papers. But they will know what they do and don’t like. Using the retail model, all that matters is you got the sale. So a marketing campaign that is dishonest but attractive is pretty normal. If you want to move to higher performing business models, you have to match the product to your target demographic. Retail is so poor performing that it isn’t even mentioned on my category list. It would be “Category 0”.

E33 is an amazing game in a lot of ways. It deserves praise. But now what? The team is clearly capable of great things. They could keep making retail games, but if they could move to a higher category level they would make a lot more money over time. A game like E33 will not survive at any Category 1 through 4 (it can’t be converted to 5 or 6 due to lack of social systems) because players will fatigue and ultimately become exhausted. Again, a consumer is usually not sophisticated enough to articulate this, but they will put your product down without knowing why.

It’s a bit of a crime that Baldur’s Gate 3 was not made into a GaaS, a lot of revenue was lost. But it can be. Because the game is relaxing. E33 will never have that option unless the fast action systems can be mitigated somehow. Path of Exile 2 is in the same boat as E33 here.

Making a lot of money should not be difficult for a studio of this quality, at a time when AAA cannot even muster this quality level at any budget point. So this is their moment. If they did want to appeal to everyone, they could just give the option of playing completely without the fast action systems. That’s not “easy mode”, they would have to make the turn based game harder to make it challenging. In a GaaS, they could reward teams for having good thinkers working together with fast fingered people. I designed Civilization Online to work this way before racism killed the project.

So in conclusion, I’d really like to play E33 without having to hurt myself in the process. I’d like children to have that option also. If Sandfall Interactive could accommodate actual turn based gamers, they would make more money and everyone would win. It also would be helpful if influencers could learn what “turn based” means if they are going to be communicating the merits of various games to their audiences.