Realtime Game

An observation was made that a real-time game is turn-based, with (usually) automatic turn changes and (typically) a small timeout between turn changes. "My game runs at 60 turns per second" works, though the more common word used is "frames", probably from the movie industry who run a sequence of pictures at some more or less constant rate. This musing was prompted by (yet another) discussion of what a roguelike is, for which one might find various and sometimes incompatible definitions. Nuance (or judgment) can be added with modifiers, so one has a "traditional roguelike", "what passes for a roguelike on Steam these days", etc. There are various (mostly compatible) definitions, some of which exclude the original game, rogue (~1980) from being a roguelike.

Unix also went (or is going, and will go) though a "what passes for..." phase where I think it was some executive at DEC used the line "it's what passes for unix these days". Unix was originally a small research operating system for (then) minicomputers, though you may catch people claiming that unix was for mainframes. Unix is generally not real-time.

The term "roguelike" is probably similar to that of the "fugue" from music, where eventually someone will write a book on what a roguelike is, the result of which will be no satisfactory conclusion beyond that the term evolves over time, much like music that ever chases after some MacGuffin somewhere…

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