In Celebration of Slow Gaming

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with an all-guns-blazing approach to video gaming. Sometimes you want to experience the heart-racing, blood-pumping thrill of whatever new sharpshooting game that’s hit the market, but sometimes, you just want to relax. In times where you want to relax, there’s nothing like a game that can be played at any pace you like.

Perhaps it has goals to reach, perhaps it has no objectives at all, but the important thing is you can do it in your own time. These games fall under the umbrella of slow gaming, an idea that has been around for a long while, but only very recently earned its own name. Let’s take a minute out of our busy schedules to celebrate some of the best things about slow gaming, including some brilliant titles to add to your collection.

Taking a more relaxed approach to gaming could allow our creativity to blossom.

A Place For Slow Gamer Recognition?

Whilst the skill and patience involved in creating something beautiful in a traditional slow game cannot be questioned, it is not as celebrated as it should be. Esports are hugely competitive and they are famous for the generous prizes that are awarded to gamers for their video gaming prowess. They can shoot, steer, and dive quicker and more accurately than all of the other players, and these skills all deserve recognition.

After all, many train for hours and hours each day to reach the heights that they have. Yet that leaves the truly brilliant slow gamers without tournaments of their own. How exactly could you hold a slow gaming tournament? Would everyone be given one hundred hours to create something incredible? Would that suck all of the joy out of slow gaming entirely, making people play slow games quickly?

Some people long for slow gamers to have trophies and tournaments to aim for, but the exact shape that these could take hasn’t been fine-tuned yet. For many, the joy of slow gaming is the lack of competition. Games like Stardew Valley and Terraria are wildly popular in slow gaming circles and fans enjoy nothing more than showing their creations to one another.

If you have a quick browse through the Reddit threads for these games then you’ll come across on-screen projects which would take hundreds of hours to create. Impressive as they are, even more incredible are some of the off-screen enjoyment that people get from the games. Creating miniature figurines out of air-hardening clay, needle felting their favorite characters, there’s no end to the creativity of these gamers.

It seems that slow games suit those who are predisposed to deep thinking and creative pursuits. Perhaps part of the joy of slow gaming is in the creativity that it can get flowing when the game isn’t even playing.

The Perfect Introduction

For friends who can’t be together, multiplayer slow games can be a great way to keep the friendship alive and thriving

For those in the know, the slow living movement has been going for a surprisingly long time. For some people it means really returning to our roots, living off the grid, growing our own vegetables, and checking out of consumer society. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this approach, if you can achieve it then that really is commendable, but it simply isn’t realistic for everyone.

Smartphones, computers, and 21st-century technology are an ingrained part of our lives now and they aren’t inherently bad. The problems arise when they’re used obsessively, to a point where they jeopardize our relationships with real people. Slow gaming could be one area where people are able to reconnect with one another, in a technological way.

Some slow games, for example, Animal Crossing, offer the opportunity for players to collaborate with one another. Some families and friendship groups who live separately from one another have found this game a great way to connect when they can’t be together in person.

These groups have decided that using the multiplayer function they are all going to live on their on-screen islands together. By grouping their efforts together in this way, they can work towards shared common goals. The achievements happen more quickly, you bond with your friends as you play and if you think about it, this is exactly the way that we build friendships in the real world.

Far from video gaming disconnecting us from people, this new genre of slow games could actually be a way for us to reconnect with our friends.