10 hours ago, Kavik Kang said:This has been a fascinating discussion for me. I was aware of your concept of the Game Loop but have never had how you use this concept explained in such detail before (I read a couple of the linked articles, as well). As I've said before "Rube is a part of nature", a generic simulation of time combined with reality. All games and simulations simulate time in some form, however abstract. Even simple back and forth turns like in Checkers are a highly abstract simulation of time. Your Game Loop is a "moment of time containing reality" that is actually very similar to a Steve Cole "impulse". The foundation of what I call "Rube" is everywhere, because time is everywhere.
Somebody asked you 'Your definition of Rube sounds like you talk about a generic physics engine'. Seems that guy wasn't that wrong.
(... but i'm still curious about the myth of Rube 
)
I think it's somehow ok to compare a turn based board game that tries to model realistic behavior by rules with the physics update of a realtime video game, but maybe i can point out some differences:
The video game can use known physics equations to get very accurate realistic motion. It's easy for us to calculate the trajectory and rotation of a space ship with properties such as mass, moment of inertia, position, velocity, thruster force etc. We just store all those numbers and use Isaacs equations to update them. No game designer rules required for that, but the game designer can tweak properties like mass or thruster force to balance things and trade mobility vs. strength etc.
In contrast calculating contact forces for a stack of boxes at rest is hard (multi body system), while flying spaceships are easy (single bodies). We can use a physics engine that solves all this for us or we implement ourselves. In any case we get realistic physics.
However, at some point it turns out it is almost impossible to model time continuously because physics interactions can grow to unpredictable complexity. Even if we know the math to predict the trajectory of a single thrown stone analytically (so we can calculate its position at any time), we can't do this in practice for multi body systems and all their potential interactions.
We need to make discrete timesteps instead, typically 1/60 seconds to update physics state once for every frame of a 60 fps game.
So this seems similar to the turn based games you have in mind, they are discrete in time as well. But the difference really is that realism happens automatically to us if we want so. We use laws of nature to achieve this, designed rules are another option. We often break realism to increase fun of course.
EDIT:
Oh, extending this might also show why the video game industry does not look for inspiration from board games, just remember what happened: So we have a computer and a screen and we know it's easy to do some simulation... hey, let's sync our physics update timestep to the time happening in the real world: Wow! We createad an alternate reality! Holy shit that's intense - i'll never play a board game again! This is so much better, greater, entirely different, even better than movies, woahaha! 
