The Cure for Downtime Is Emotional Investment, Not Frequency of Choices

One of the big problems with turn-based games is downtime. Downtime is often framed as a lack of opportunities to make choices, yet plenty of games have low downtime despite stretches of gameplay with few or no choices. The real cause of downtime is a lack of emotional investment in what the active player is doing. The role of choices in preventing downtime is to create that investment by causing players to identify with certain parts of the game.

In psychology, the endowment effect describes how choices give items a sense of ownership, which in turn associates those items with the self. We value things we identify with our selves more, monitor their status more, and care more about what happens to them. Through this, player choices endow the game objects they touch with relevance that drives engagement. Therefore, what matters is not how many choices players make but how broad their coverage is.

You can see the relationship among choices, investment, and engagement in Magical Athlete, a game that at first glance appears to be a standard roll-and-move, like Snakes and Ladders or Ludo, except that each racer has a unique power. On your turn, you roll a die and move your racer that many spaces along the racetrack. Some racers have minor choices to make, but most do not. Despite the lack of choices during the game, players remain engaged because, before each race, they choose which racer they want to use in that race. That single choice echoes throughout the entire round because whenever anything interesting happens, it is directly the result of the racers' wacky special abilities.

Programming games are another example of this. Players set up sequences of moves in advance and then watch them unfold, often to hilarity. Sometimes the sequences are short, but they can often take minutes to resolve. In Mamma Mia, players spend the entire round stacking a deck with cards, only to go through the entire deck at the end of the round, watching to see what happens. Though it consists mostly of watching cards being flipped, this phase is the most exciting part of the game because you get to find out whether the plans you set up worked as expected.

The problem of downtime is often not so much that you aren't doing anything as that you aren't emotionally invested in what the active player is doing. Embedding endowed objects in their focus areas addresses this by increasing the chances that they will interact with something you care about. This is easier on shared boards; in Carcassonne, cloisters score points for each adjacent tile, so you care when your opponent builds nearby.

Games with personal boards have a harder time with this solution. Though you could have players contribute endowed items to other players' boards, a more common approach is to create points of interest on your own board for other players to interact with, often to the benefit of both players. In Imperial Settlers, open production spots let other players give you workers to gain the resource shown.

If choices reduce downtime indirectly through the endowment effect, we can reduce the number of choices we present to players without decreasing engagement. To fight downtime, we need to ensure that a player's choices touch every part of the game, so that no matter what their opponents do, they have a reason to care.