I've Become the Guy Who Plays Games at the Hangout

Console gaming has many flavours

The platonic ideal first. The intense single-player experience is just you, your controller, the screen, and maybe a beer. Very intimate, personal time with four hours of uninterrupted progress. In second place there is multiplayer. You're playing with one or more friends. Snacks are eaten. Swear words are sworn. Smack talk. You know, bonding. Third, we have co-op gaming which is a combination of first and second place. 

Then we get down to playing games for the benefit of an audience. We have small streamers who casually stream for their friends or a small but dedicated fan base. A few streamers even make a tidy buck doing it for a living! Single-player streamers tend to be the norm here. We also have a fair amount of Let's Players and sick clippers doing the rounds but all of this requires an internet connection and for someone to click on a link. But we can go deeper still. 

For me, the ideal streaming experience is entirely offline. One person (usually me) is playing, but one or more people, whether they are paying full attention at any given time or not, can dip in it out of watching me play, chatting to someone, or fixing drinks for everyone. Think less Scorsese film and more like Bake Off in terms of what's on the screen and what purpose it serves for the room. It's one step above watching the music-fueled screensavers from the Windows Media Player days. This is the lane I prefer to swim in.

An example then, my mother-in-law visited over the holidays (see here for another reference to my mother-in-law). For as long as I've known her, One of her favourite things to do in the world is to casually watch me play Super Mario World on the SNES Mini. According to my spouse, she also used to be quite good at playing the game herself but she has since decided to retire from actively playing it herself and now prefers to watch. Um, you know, to the point where she'll have flown all the way across from Madrid just to watch me play Super Mario World again.

Sometimes we will forgo a restaurant date because she prefers to watch me doing this. It's great though. Like, I've played the game to death anyway so it's a nice relaxing time for me. On the one hand, she's transfixed for brief spells but then on the other, she can check her phone, talk to me and my spouse, and generally stop paying attention whenever she wants and it's nobody has to make a big deal out of it. It's Bake Off, but Mario.

But historically she's only been interested in Super Mario World. I can maybe get her to watch some Crash Bandicoot if she's in a spicy mood but that's very rare. This year it was a relief to see that she would accept the entertainment value of Super Mario Wonder because Hey, it meant that I wasn't playing Super Mario World again. You know what else? I was trying to complete my standee collection having finished literally everything in the game at that point. I could cheekily farm for purple coins while entertaining my mother-in-law. By the end of her time with us, I was done!

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Closer to New Year's, we invited our relatively new neighbour over for a smoke and a drink, he vapes outside a lot and I'd said hi to him enough times. This would be the longest time we'd spent with him. Real 'get to know you' territory.

So of course I start playing Thumper on the big TV. I think we were talking about music tastes and the new neighbour used the word 'intense' to describe his music taste and one thing led to another thing led to Thumper on the big TV. It was the tail end of a messy night so that's all the detail I have about how Thumper came to be on the big TV. My spouse casually apologised to the new neighbour for the abstract rhythm horror playing out on the screen but the neighbour was nodding and smiling, stating that 'he was into it'. Our new neighbour is a pretty cool guy it turns out.

I don't have a similarly cool story for how Bomb Chicken, Super Mario Wonder, or Puzzle Lines DX ended up on the big TV. At this point, I was just playing five or so minutes of this game. and then five or ten minutes of another. I was creating colours and shapes on a screen that were compelling enough to create a mild background vibe in the room, but nothing so compelling that casual conversation and general vibery would have to take a back seat to the action on screen. We had achieved a delicate balance and dear reader, it was a really chill time.

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Some games are better than others at achieving this 'Sitcom Effect'. I've had some time to reflect on what makes for a good Sitcom Effect Game (or SEG if you will) and I'll set them out for you now.

You need a very low on-ramp time to get SEG status. The time from booting up the game to actually playing the game should be less than a couple of minutes. If your PS5 game requires a 45-minute patch then that's clearly not a SEG. I'm also not keen on 60-second loading times every time you die so that eliminates most FromSoftware and Bethesda stuff. You don't have any of that nonsense with Bomb Chicken. You can be bomb-shitting kick-chicken in next to no time. Bomb Chicken is a SEG.

Next up is readability. A spectator who is low on both investment and attention, possibly even low game literacy also, must be able to get a good read on what is happening on the screen and why. Unless you're all part of Riot's League of Legends death cult, that game is nigh unreadable for anyone trying to watch it. Before you all rush in to disagree with me you'll have to admit it's no Mario Tennis Aces or Nidhogg. It's certainly no Bomb Chicken. Everyone knows where they stand concerning Bomb Chicken, even if they didn't watch the tutorial levels.

The final gut check for the SEG is admittedly context-sensitive. It's almost redundant to say 'read the room' because that generally applies to all actions where the number of people in the situation is greater than or equal to 2. But vibe check you must. If you're at Jesse Pinkman's house, maybe RAGE is a legitimate SEG, but graphic violence is generally a no-no, except for when it isn't. Doom is either the best SEG for your hangout room or the worst. Use your best judgement, traveller. 

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Practicality aside, there's a deeper sense of relaxation I get from playing games without any particular purpose or goal in mind than mildly entertaining a room of stoners and drunks. I find that all too often that when I'm playing videogames, that I'm doing it with a task-oriented mindset. I often hear people talking about their gaming in the language of productivity and work. People set themselves goals of completing AAA games as if their next performance review depends on it. The 'pile of shame' is partially shameful because it represents a body of unfinished projects and wasted effort. Not to mention of course the culture of achievements and trophies. Sure you played the game, but did you play the game diligently and masterfully? This is all sounding less 'I'm having fun' and more 'I'm doing my job'.

When I become The Guy Who Plays Games at the Hangout, there is an element of a different kind of work being done. Emotional labour, fulfilling a social role, call it what you want. But the work I've done in these contexts is mostly social. It allowed me to enjoy the simple pleasure of playing for its own sake in a way that I typically find it hard to do otherwise. I'm not playing Bomb Chicken to tick Bomb Chicken off my list. I'm playing Bomb Chicken because it's a thing to do.

(And yes, I do realise that the Super Mario Wonder purple coins thing was a bit of a productivity wheeze in its own right. This mindset is a sickness.)

As a neurospicy individual (diagnosis pending) I want to try all the things and do all the things and see all the things and it's exhausting. Whenever I'm playing one game, there is an acute feeling that there's an opportunity cost being realised because I could be doing several other things. It's taking me years of training, therapy, and drugs to condition myself to channel my fizzing mind in such a way that it can perform well in the workplace at all.

That mental training has leaked over into my leisure time. Yes, it's very cool for me that I can marshal the attention span to finish difficult books and finish long video games. But because those skills were learned in my work life, in the world of work, it somewhat poisons the enjoyment somewhat. Why would I even apply the word 'backlog' to a pile of books that I haven't read. It all sounds very Salesforced!

Working against the playful and chaotic nature of my own mind is a small yet constant drain on my mental reserves. There's something refreshing and easy about just bibbling around from one game to the next and just trying things out for a few minutes at a time. It's refreshingly effortless to chase the pure thrill of being constantly stimulated with new and different things in rapid succession with no guilt or shame attached to it. It's the guilty pleasure of short form video content applied to videogames. It's the pleasure of trying the first few levels of 30 different Super Mario World rom hacks in an afternoon. Who cares if it's decadent and wasteful. Downtime doesn't need to be frown time!

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Look, most people reading this will exist at the intersection between living in a neoliberal work-obsessed hellscape and having a lifelong obsession with videogames culture. I just want you to understand that as fun as it can be to treat videogames as work, or apply what you've learned at work to games (and vice-versa) that there should also be a space in your gaming life that's purely about the sensation of interacting with something digital and enjoying the feedback for a short while without the tendrils of the grindsetters burrowing into the experience.

For me, playing games socially like this in offline, non-monetised, low pressure way is the route I've found to achieving this. I hope you can find your own way too.