Therefore, the most important thing to focus on is not the labels themselves but what types of gameplay they represent. For example, the tower-defense game Plants vs. Zombies is ostensibly real-time, but its characteristics are more in line with traditional turn-based games. Besides being solely a single-player game, the gameplay itself is strictly deterministic, even moreso than many turn-based games. The map consists of five tracks along which the zombies progress, each with exactly nine slots on which to place defensive plants. Furthermore, the zombies\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 behavior is entirely predictable – Pole Valuting Zombies will always jump over blocking Wall-nuts, even if that means falling right into the jaws of a Chomper plant. The game may look chaotic to an observer, but – like most tower-defense games – the strategic play is built upon predictable enemy behavior. The real-time mechanics simply provide time pressure, not the other qualities usually associated with the format, such as chaotic play or a multi-player mode.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve always thought that the division of strategy games into turn based and real time categories was artificial. How a game tracks time is, in my opinion, less important than what it expects the player to do within that time. Soren Johnson seems to agree with me. He just posted his August Game Developer column […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[14,9],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-uF","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1901"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1901"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1901\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1902,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1901\/revisions\/1902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}