Real-Time Games Need Breaks

The big advantage of real-time games over turn-based games is that they prevent downtime by keeping players constantly engaged. Their greatest disadvantage is that they drastically reduce the budget of attention players have by requiring constant decision-making. Introducing periods of low-urgency gameplay into real-time games restores the attention depleted by the high-urgency periods. In doing so, it prevents burnout, creates narrative contrast, and gives the audience a chance to rest and reflect.

A break can be as simple as taking time to score points in between high-intensity rounds. In the classic card game Nerts, players frantically race to play cards to piles in the middle of the table in ascending order, trying to burn through their deck as fast as possible. The game is divided into rounds and played until one player reaches one hundred points. In between rounds, players take a break from the action and sort out played cards into piles to tally up their points. These breaks give their brains a rest from the high-adrenaline gameplay, preventing burnout from maintaining hyperawareness over many rounds.

The shape of a good story is a succession of peaks and valleys of tension. Without lulls in the action, the intense moments consume the player's attention, preventing them from forming a connection with the characters. RimWorld has a storyteller system that manages threats to the colony so they don't arrive in a constant stream, but rather appear occasionally, with periods of relative calm in between. The character development and emotional attachments players form during the periods of calm make the danger from disasters feel much more real. Here, breaks serve to make tense moments more narratively meaningful.

It is difficult to strategize while in the midst of a crisis. Real-time gameplay dramatically reduces the attention players have available to think deeply about a game, limiting decisions to simple ones that can be made quickly. In Plate Up, players run a high-stakes restaurant where losing even a single customer means going out of business. During the rounds, there is little time to theorize about new food preparation, task distribution, or restaurant layout. If you realize that your table arrangement creates a bottleneck, you don't have time to work out a more efficient layout; you just have to work around it. Between rounds, however, you have unlimited time to experiment. Alternating between high-tension, low-planning and low-tension, high-planning phases offers the benefits of both real-time and turn-based gameplay.

People need breaks; they cannot thrive in a high-tension environment forever. Attention is a limited resource of which real-time gameplay is chronically starved. By creating moments of attentional abundance, you can have low downtime, meaningful decisions, and compelling narrative all in the same game.