Opinion: Synchronous or Asynchronous Gameplay

[In this opinion piece originally posted on the What Games Are blog, and reprinted in full with his permission, UK-based game designer Tadhg Kelly describes the differences between game time and real time, outlines contemporal and atemporal play, and discusses interactions between synchrony and "temporany."] Asynchronous gameplay is a popular phrase for describing various forms of online games that connect players but don't require simultaneous play. Many eminent commentators have talked about the possibilities for this kind of gameplay, and how it might be the future for games. However, in a fascinating debate on Gamasutra initiated by Ian Bogost, Raph Koster and I ran across a confusion of terms. Raph said that asynchronous games have existed for hundreds of years, citing play-by-mail Chess as an example. Except I think play-by-mail Chess is synchronous. When talking about synchrony, we actually meant two entirely different things. Where many people casually talk about synchrony in relation to whether players are together in real time, I think it means games that require players to be in sync with one another in game time. This article elaborates on that idea and describes how real and game time intermingle. Game Time or Real Time Many games are played in real time. Sports, action games, console shooters, racing games and more are all real-time experiences in which one or more players acts and reacts to a world that in motion. However, like weight and mass, game time and real time are not the same thing. They only appear to be so under certain circumstances. A single player game might be played in real time, such as Portal 2, but then you have to go away and cook dinner for your wife. So the game is paused or saved, to come back later. A single move in play-by-mail Chess might not receive a response for several days. A tabletop roleplaying campaign may start and stop over a number of discrete sessions of real time spaced out by long periods where the game is not being played. Game time is always internal to the game world, and it may not tick forward on a second-by-second basis. Whereas real time is all around us all of the time and always ticks at the same rate (relativity not withstanding). This is an important distinction. Synchrony Synchrony is a property of all games:

Synchrony is often used broadly, such as different game modes. Single and multiplayer modes are the most common example, but there are some subtle mixes also. CityVille, for example, is a mostly asynchronous game with the exception of the gating mechanism that requires you to hire friends to work in a building. Gating requires their action to complete the loop for you to win, so that is synchronous. That's why I describe synchrony in terms of loops rather than the whole game. A loop is a basic molecule of gameplay in which the player takes an action and the game reacts in some way, determining whether the player experiences a win, a loss, or another loop. In an asynchronous loop the reaction comes from the game itself, but in a synchronous one it is dependent on other players. Loops also vary in length. In team deathmatch Halo the loops are in real time, but in PBM Chess the game time only ticks forward when a turn is taken. So a single loop might take days to close. And yet the need for involvement of other players is the same. So that's why synchrony is related to game time rather than real time. Temporany The more casual definition of synchronous gameplay means 'playing at the same time'. The dependency on other players that my definition implies is not present, so it could mean players playing alongside each other within a common space, or competitively, or in parallel. For me that's just too hazy. Designing with player dependency in mind is very different to that of simple simultaneous presence. YoVille and deathmatch Quake may both be played by groups of players online at the same time, but they are completely different. It is not enough to say they are both 'synchronous'. In the debate on Gamasutra, I suggested that the casual definition of synchronous or asynchronous is actually describing a different property to synchrony. I labelled it temporany. The definition of temporany is:

So your Counter-Strike session or Texas Hold'Em games are contemporal, but your Mass Effect or Chu Chu Rocket games are atemporal. Wandering around Playstation Home or YoVille is contemporal, but visiting a friend's restaurant in Restaurant City is atemporal. Temporany is about whether players are in the same place at the same time or not, irrespective of why they are so. Where the Twain Shall Meet The fun part (for me at least) is how synchrony and temporany interact with one another. For example: You visit your friend in Farm Town, and he is online at the same time. You help him clean up his crops and chat to one another. Is that contemporal? Yes. Is it synchronous? No. It's contemporal because both of you are in the same space at the same time. However it's asynchronous because he doesn't actually need you to help clean up those crops. Your help is not a requirement of his win. On the other hand: Your friend in CityVille sends you a gift request. He needs Marble to help complete his community building, and asks you to send him some. Is this contemporal? No, it's atemporal because you do not need to be online at the same time to send or receive the message. Is it synchronous? Yes. He needs your help to win. Synchrony and temporany form a grid. There is contemporal synchrony, contemporal asynchrony, atemporal synchrony and atemporal asynchrony. More conventionally, although less accurately, you might call them: multi-play, parallel-play, turn-based-play and single-play. Quake, World of Warcraft, WeeWar, Portal 2. Not all combinations of synchrony and temporany work equally well in all situations, and it's important to understand why. Each tests the tolerance of players differently, and so synchrony and temporany actually form one of the major constraints on all games. Tolerance