Waiting to play: The labour of background games

Introduction

The social, material and economic contexts of mobile phone practices have given rise to genres of digital play based not around playing but around waiting to play. Mobile games, such as Tiny Tower, Simpsons: Tapped Out, Cookie Clicker, Pocket Planes, Godus and Fallout: Shelter, ask the player to set up a series of tasks that take anywhere from a few minutes to several days of real time to complete. The player then closes the game, goes about his or her life and returns once the task is done to reap its rewards and queue up new tasks. Whereas mobile play has been previously theorised as part of social practices of waiting, where mobile games are commonly played intermittently in between daily activities (Hjorth and Richardson, 2011), these games – that we here conceptualise as background games – formally integrate the necessity of waiting into their playing. Background games recognise that players typically play mobile games for a few minutes at a time, yet work to instil a longer sense of progression and achievement over a much longer period of time. They also play into existing economic pressures faced by mobile game developers, where instead of paying for the game, players who prefer not to wait (for free) are given the option to progress instantly (for a cost).

Background games are thus caught up in a complex socio-material and economic web of imperatives that both perpetuate and challenge notions of how games on mobile devices are engaged with. Furthermore, they introduce new insights and complexities into the tensions between ‘play’ and ‘labour’ in mobile media and everyday life contexts. Indeed, as smartphones and mobile devices now accompany us everywhere and anywhere, with an ever-growing app-based ecology, background games become an aspect of the increasingly diverse spectrum of mobile gaming (Taylor, 2012) and consequent variable modalities of play. As Kallio et al. (2011: n.p.) argue, as mobile media theorists we need to attend to the ‘variability of meanings’ attached to gameplay, the ‘situatedness and contextuality of gaming’ and ‘the layered and overlapping character of game mentalities’ which are particularly relevant now that mobile gaming is permeating everyday spaces and cultures. To this end, this article explores how background games are engaged with within existing practices of mobile and social play to challenge and complicate existing understandings of ‘play’ and ‘labour’ around digital games. It draws from interviews conducted in Brisbane and Perth through 2014 and 2015 as part of a broader research project exploring the context of mobile play in a variety of Australian households and demographics, from teenagers to 60-year-olds, from varying professions and socio-economic backgrounds, and from singles to couples to families.

The first section begins by defining just what we mean by ‘background games’, their context in terms of both the economics of mobile games and the design of social games, as well as the critiques each of these have received. The next section turns to the existing literature on mobile play and the cultural practice of waiting, a literature challenged by background games where the player waits to play (or pays not to wait) and the game progresses while they wait. Here, the distinct ways that background games are integrated into players’ everyday lives are drawn out of interview data. The final section then details how background games emerge from a specific and deliberate economic model that counters the ‘devaluing’ of mobile games with a counterintuitive facility to spend actual money to avoid waiting. Here, we see background games as a literalised performance of both neoliberal labour and gamified workplaces: the poor work long hours, while the rich spend money so they do not have to. Yet, as this section will demonstrate, this is complicated by our interviewees who express a satisfaction in the labour of waiting, in the ‘grind’ of real-time progression, such that waiting (rather than the paying) is a crucial part of the challenge of gameplay. Finally, the conclusion will draw together these insights to emphasise the ambivalent nature of background games in the context of play and labour around mobile media use.

Defining background games ¹

When mobile game developer Nimblebit released Tiny Tower in 2011, game critics were conflicted as to the game’s worth. On one hand, here was a free, engaging, polished mobile game that allowed players to build their personalised skyscrapers. On the other hand, the game required the player to wait arbitrary lengths of time before they could open new stores or restock the shelves – sometimes a matter of days – seemingly with the sole aim of inducing the player to spend money in order to not wait. Furthermore, the game seemed to have no point; there was no discernible goal other than to keep building and keep waiting until the player got bored of playing.

Tiny Tower is exemplary of the genre of background games, as well as one of its earliest examples. An ostensibly free game, the player is charged with opening new stores in their skyscraper, stocking the shelves, ensuring new ‘bitizens’ move into the apartment and then employing them in the stores. At first, building new floors and waiting for new deliveries take only a matter of minutes, but as the tower grows taller, longer and longer time commitments are required before the next floor is built or the shelves are ready to restock. Crucially, once the timers reach zero, the shelves are not restocked automatically; rather the player must return to the game and manually restock them. If the player wishes to start building the next floor sooner, he or she must ensure the shops are regularly restocked so as to make the money required to purchase that next floor. In an essay on the game, critic JP Grant (2011) draws a parallel between the player’s desire to maximise the efficiency of their tower’s dwellers with the way the player’s own labour is commodified by the game: ‘[Tiny Tower] slaves the player to the (real time!) clock in a way that few other games do. Eventually you get the feeling you should punch a timeclock every time you boot up the damn thing’ (p. n.p.). Like Metropolis’s Freder crucified on the clock machine, the Tiny Tower players are integrated into the very system they are working to make more efficient.

Rather than ensuring profits remain consistent and patiently waiting, an alternative way to alleviate the long waiting times exists. ‘Bux’ can be spent to immediately restock shelves or finish constructing new floors. Bux, however, are not the in-game currency gained by the selling of stock in shops or obtained through the rent the bitizens play. Bux are rather a parallel ‘premium’ currency that can be purchased with an exorbitant amount of in-game money, found by completing different in-game tasks, or more typically by spending real money through the game’s internal storefront. For AUD1.49, the Tiny Tower player can obtain 250 bux; for AUD30.99, they can obtain 7500 bux.

Each of these features (the parallel currencies, the periods of enforced waiting, the need to complete regular repetitive tasks to achieve long-term larger goals and the low or non-existent up-front cost but constant temptation to spend a bit more) can be found across a range of games that can be grouped under the moniker of ‘background games’. We find this term appropriate in how it describes both the functionality of the apps and, according to our interviewees, the ambient position these games hold in their players’ lives as they go about their day-to-day activities. Background games, although they may be ‘closed’ or ‘minimised’ by the player so that they can use other apps or put their phone away, are ever-present in the way they continue to run in the background, either on the phone’s internal processing power or on the game’s external servers. When the player returns to the game, they see that the game has continued to progress in their absence: tasks are closer to completion, shelves have been emptied, money has been made and resources depleted or replenished. During this time, the game is also in the background of the player’s mind – not forgotten, but not the focus. As players go about their day, the game continues to work on the tasks the player has set up. Occasionally, when a task has completed, the game may return to the foreground in the form of a notification, working to lure the player back to the game. Background games can thus be defined as those mobile games where the majority of the work happens while the player is not playing them, but which require the player to return to them at regular intervals to ensure the play advances.

In definitional terms, there is considerable overlap between background games and what have been defined as ‘social games’, or games that are played through social networking sites (SNS), such as Facebook. Many social games, specifically those that involve resource or time management (such as Farmville), also require background activities such as daily ‘checking in’, periodic resource management, rewards for mini-game achievements, waiting for tasks to complete and intermittent attendance to and maintenance of a simulated environment. In this way, social games, like background games, quite deliberately ‘accommodate real life necessities’ (Rao, 2008) by allowing players to check into their games in between other activities throughout the day. As Moore (2011) comments, we no longer ‘consciously take games with us in order to access diverse ludic experiences’; rather our play operates across work and leisure domains, and domestic and public spaces, following us ‘in new ways, through digital distribution services, across social networks and over cloud-based applications’ (p. 374).

In this way, social and background games are each an enactment of ambient play, as they embed themselves within the patterns and habitudes of everyday life. Yet by definition, social games also involve some form of social interaction through trading and gifting or simply through published notification of game results and players’ scores through SNS profiles. In large part, the success of social games has been attributed to the close-knit relation between social games and online social networks, and the way the latter persistently and repetitively embed game information into the broader social network, often via profile-linked mini-feeds of the users’ game actions. By contrast, background games such as Tiny Tower do not necessarily involve a social element, but can be played discretely. Furthermore, whereas players of traditional social games must wait for an energy bar to refill in order to continue progressing through the game, in a background game the players are continuing to progress while they are waiting – they are not waiting to perform tasks but waiting for set tasks to be completed.

There has been significant criticism of social games, background games and some resource and time management games more generally in terms of their status ‘as games’, due to the way they require what some regard as a facile form of resource acquisition, and because they actively prompt users to ‘pay to not play’. Game critic and designer Ian Bogost (2010) created the game Cow Clicker as a deliberate and derisive parody of such games:

It’s partly a satire, and partly a playable theory of today’s social games, and partly an earnest example of that genre. You get a cow. You can click on it. In six hours, you can click it again. Clicking earns you clicks. You can buy custom ‘premium’ cows through micropayments (the Cow Clicker currency is called ‘mooney’), and you can buy your way out of the time delay by spending it. (n.p.)

As Cow Clicker sardonically exposes, ‘playing’ is itself optional, as rote play acts (i.e. clicking) can be skipped or avoided by buying clicks (or other actions or objects) with real money. In a very literal sense, for Bogost (2010), these are games that ‘you don’t have to play’, and thus, not really games at all. In addition, they do violence by their persistent incursion upon our time even when we are not playing through reminders and updates, arbitrary wait-times for recharging energy and an underlying compulsion to accumulate clicks, points, resources or virtual currency.

Upon posting his rationale for the game on his blog, Bogost received numerous comments, many in defence of the way such games can provide ‘tiny slices of pleasure’ and relief from the daily grind. Thus, despite the substantial criticisms these games garner from both game developers and theorists, it is salient to remind ourselves of the value ascribed to them by the people who play them and of the need to critically interpret such play in situ through the ethnographic study of players. The debate is a useful one, however, as it forces us as cultural and media critics to unpack the complex fiscal and social relations that reside in mobile game ecologies, and to carefully articulate the various trajectories of the ‘lusory attitude’ in contemporary cultural practices.

Background games are also a subset of the broader genre of mobile casual games but importantly complicate how such games are often conceptualised. Casual games first received committed scholarly attention by Juul (2010), and more recently in the context of mobile devices by Hjorth (2007), Richardson (2012) and Keogh (2014). Often, the flexible play sessions, ‘juicy’ visuals and accessible interfaces of mobile casual games are contrasted against the committed play demanded of console and desktop computer games. Whereas console and computer games often demand that the player cease other activities to focus solely on the gameplay for an extended period of time, casual games (especially on mobile devices) are more flexible, able to be played for short periods of time and put away at a moment’s notice. This is in line with Hjorth and Richardson’s observations that mobile screens are often engaged with intermittently while the user is waiting to do other things.

In multiple interviews, a year apart (2014–2015) with a range of mobile phone users residing in the cities of Brisbane and Perth, Australia (10 households in each location), background games and more traditional casual games (such as match-3 puzzle games and arcade runners) were both frequently mentioned. Significantly, however, while interviewees rarely played casual mobile games for more than a couple of months before they moved on to the next, background games were more often played consistently over 1 or more years. Two interviewees from different households, for instance, have been playing The Simpsons: Tapped Out (in which the player progressively rebuilds the cartoon town of Springfield) for over 3 years. Similarly, one of our Perth participants (quoted below) has played Godus (in which the player acts as a god, sculpting land, breeding workers, and setting them building, farming and mining tasks to earn the in-game currency ‘belief’) for over a year. As a further anecdotal example, one of the authors of this article has been playing Tiny Tower on and off again for 5 years around briefer engagements with a range of other mobile casual games.

Importantly, background games emerge not just from new strands of creative design but also from a very particular economic context particular to mobile games. While some mobile games still charge an upfront cost to play, our interviewees expressed a strong reluctance to spend money on games they considered mere ‘distractions’, and moreover, considered not paying as part of the challenge and pleasure of play. This was a consistent attitude across both interviewees who do spend money on other forms of digital play, such as console videogames, and those interviewees for whom casual mobile games are the primary form of digital game they engage with. This reflects a broader shift of casual mobile games towards a ‘free-to-play’ model, where a game costs nothing to obtain and instead relies on either the in-app purchases for more impatient players (such as obtaining ‘bux’ or ‘belief’) or the presence of advertisements in order to turn a profit. Different types of in-app purchases include cosmetic changes (different character models, etc.), new content, different power-ups and abilities, or most relevant to this discussion, the ability to minimise waiting periods through purchasing and using premium currencies.

This section has provided an outline of what background games are, how they are played and how they can be distinguished from other social and mobile games. The following two sections explore these latter two themes in more depth, beginning first with a deeper understanding of background games in relation to the existing literature on mobile ‘casual’ games and the ambient nature of background games.

Mobile games, casual games and ambient play

Mobile phones are taken with us out into the world. They are frequently used in public settings but yet are often also deeply personalised and intimate devices. As game interfaces, as Hjorth and Richardson (2014) have noted, mobile devices allow players to choose and flexibly alternate between different levels of attention, distraction, engagement and investment, depending on the game and the context of play. Even as mobile screens are used in increasingly committed fashions (for gaming and other purposes), as game devices their portability, multi-functionality and ever-presence means that play can be fitted easily into the contextures and habitudes of everyday life, ensuring that the mobile user remains ready to refocus their attention away from the mobile screen at any time. While several participants in our study also described periods of dedicated gameplay on their mobile phones and tablets, briefer and more sporadic interaction with background games – that is, play that takes place throughout the day and in the midst of other activities – was the prevalent trend in how our interviewees engaged playfully with their mobile devices.

This is why, in part, contemporary mobile devices have become the dominant home for ‘casual’ or small games. As Juul noted in his interviews with casual game players in the late 2000s (before the widespread popularisation of either smartphone devices or mobile casual games), the crucial element that casual games offered their players that non-casual games did not was a sense of flexibility. A casual game player might still play a game for 2 or more hours a day, but that time can be split across a number of shorter sessions in between other activities, rather than enacted in the form of a single, uninterrupted play session as more substantial games might demand. Indeed, the activity of casual mobile gaming can often take place during times of ‘waiting’ (for a friend, at a bus stop or on public transport) and becomes a way of managing the corporeal agitation of impatience, aloneness and boredom in public, effecting a mobilisation of private space that can be deployed in situ while ‘being-with-others’. In much mobile game development, there is a close relation between the temporal flexibility of mobile games and the sporadic attention of mobile users.

The term ‘casual’, however, is one that is hotly contested by both scholars and videogame players alike. As others have shown (Hjorth and Richardson, 2014; Taylor, 2009), the demarcation of a videogame (and more commonly mobile game) as a ‘casual game’ is loaded with a sense of unimportance and, more worryingly, of gendering the labour of different game players. As Hjorth and Richardson (2009) argue, one of the biggest gendered conflations surrounding mobile media and games is rooted in unexamined clichés around women and girls playing casual mobile games and males playing ‘serious’ online strategy games. Within much game literature, casual games are often characterised as a mode of engagement that requires relatively low-level skills and little commitment; those who play casual games themselves describe the activity as peripheral, a ‘fun’ and incidental distraction at best and a ‘waste of time’ at worst. Yet in A Casual Revolution, Juul (2010) suggests that the stereotypes of the hardcore and casual player are a crude over-simplification of the often complex and variable modalities of play, effectively disguising the often dedicated ways casual games are played. Similarly, on his Gamasutra blog, game developer Kevin Gliner (2013) argues that such a shallow reading of game audiences is problematic because it fails to recognise the spectrum of individual game practices. First, such categories can only be applied in situ, in the context of a specific game product; that is, there are ‘different people for different products, and one game’s hardcore player is another’s casual player’. Second, they assume that a game can be defined in terms of a certain type of play-mode, instead of treating casual and hardcore play as separate and compatible in the same game. Third, and most importantly, the identification of generic gamer markets relies on a narrow understanding of player behaviour – that an individual seeks the exact same play experience every time (Gliner, 2013).

Whereas ‘casual game’ problematically suggests the labour of their players is somehow less committed or less significant than those of non-casual or ‘hardcore’ gamers, Hjorth and Richardson (2016) suggest the alternative term ‘ambient play’ to account for mobile play as ‘thoroughly embodied, situated, and social’. Drawing from the notion of ambient sound, ambient play

enables a flexible and open approach to games and playfulness more generally, as it effectively incorporates the various ways we engage with and embody mobile games in our everyday lives, deliberately moves beyond the problematic ascription of the term ‘casual’ to mobile games, and conveys the way mobile media are part of a lusory sensibility in contemporary culture. (Hjorth and Richardson, 2016: p. 105)

Like ‘casual’, ‘ambient’ accounts for the flexibility required by certain kinds of digital games (especially those on mobile devices). Unlike ‘casual’, however, ‘ambient’ does not suggest the same sense of triviality or lack of commitment. An ambient game may be only played for 5 minutes at a time, but importantly, it can also be imbued with a sense of ever-presence, filtering into numerous quotidian contexts as the player goes about their day, like a low hum in the background. They are thus modalities of play that hold cultural significance in terms of our critical understanding of everyday life practices.

Background games embody this notion of ambient play and, in doing so, invert the relationship between mobile play and practices of waiting as it is commonly understood. Instead of games that are played while the player is waiting, these are games that the player waits to play. While most of the time they are situated in the background of awareness, at various intervals they make themselves known according to real-time progression, thus demanding a certain inflexibility typically understood as the inverse of good casual or ambient design. Participants in our study described how they would deliberately plan the task setting in their background games to ensure ongoing progression and achievement, effectively enacting a correlation between gameplay and everyday life activities.

Jenny, ² a 29-year-old retail assistant from Brisbane, plays Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff primarily on her iPad (although her save file is synced across both her iPad and her iPhone). She does not take her iPad with her to work each day; rather,

If I do plan on being away and know that I’m not going to see my iPad for a while … I’ll set the characters to do tasks that take like 16 hours or a day, knowing that I don’t have to worry about it before I come home again.

When she is at home, she regularly checks in on the game’s tasks while watching television: ‘I’ll just pick it up and make sure there’s no tasks that have to be started or just finished.’

Peter, a 22-year-old blind-fitter from Perth, confesses that he generally tries to keep his interaction with technology to a minimum during the day, and does not consider himself to be a ‘gamer’ as such. SimCity is the only mobile game he plays apart from QuizUp which he plays with his girlfriend Sarah. Peter jokes that Sarah thinks he is ‘obsessed’ with SimCity; Peter notes ‘But I have to check it … it’s a reward-based game’. While at work, he leaves his phone in his bag: ‘I don’t like having it around, coz I’d check it more often … it’s a distraction’. But he does play SimCity throughout the day for 2–3 minutes at a time to check his status. Peter reflects upon how much he likes the reward and goal-oriented aspect of the game towards building a city metropolis: ‘My next big goal is that I need a population of 160,000 and then I can unlock my airport … You’re always building towards something and constantly improving, and everything just gets bigger and better’. Peter adds that he has always been drawn to these sorts of games that require you to ‘unlock achievements’ and constantly ‘upgrade’; ‘that’s what keeps me involved … once I start to plateau in a game I lose interest in it’. When he and Sarah joke about it, again Peter comments that he would never delete it: ‘it’s like a baby, I’ve nurtured this city’.

As Jenny and Peter articulate, background games must be attended to in a way that challenges the presumption that casual mobile game players are not committed to or immersed in their play, that mobile games are always flexible to the player’s temporal constraints and that progression is an effect of actually playing the game. On one hand, they embrace this flexibility, able to be set and forgotten about until the player is ready to return to them again, with little punishment for not returning for an extended period of time. Yet, at the same time, for committed players like Jenny and Peter they are less flexible; background games can rarely be played for extended periods of uninterrupted time due to the long waiting periods for each task to be completed, yet at the same time they are not forgotten. They require more planning, management and deliberate integration into players’ everyday life practices than do other kinds of small mobile games. In this way, they remain ambient – sometimes for years – in the background of players’ lives.

Wait to play, pay to not play

Bogost’s critique of enforced waiting or ‘paying not to play’ is well aligned with numerous other analyses of the labour of videogame players, such as Kline et al. (2003), Kücklich (2005), and Terranova (2000). Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter (2009) look at the complex ways that the ‘immaterial labour’ of both videogame players and developers ‘excites, mobilizes, trains, and exploits [Empire’s] new planetary workforce’ (p. 32). While such critiques of ‘playbour’ (Kücklich, 2005) are crucial to interpreting the various ways that both the development and consumption of videogames perpetuate and exist within capitalist forces, Banks and Humphreys (2008) urge caution against the ways that ‘labour’ and ‘exploitation’ are often linked ‘that positions player creators as unknowing and somewhat duped victims of media corporations’ (p. 404). Players, they show, are often critically aware of the labour dynamics within which their playing resides.

It is worthy to critique background games as replicating the systems of capitalist labour in microcosm, where the player must either do the hard hours of work or, if they can afford to, shoot straight to the top by paying money. It is certainly not a coincidence that the vast majority of background games depict acts of mundane labour instead of the audacious adventures of console genres – managing a farm, building a tower, looking after a shop and so on. These are games about everyday labour that demand the player’s everyday labour in order to progress, while those that can afford to skip that labour entirely, by paying not to play, may do so.

Indeed, some interviewees did remark on the seeming pointlessness and tediousness of background games, the way they present a carrot-on-a-stick style of design rather than meaningful goals based on skill or game knowledge. Jonathan, a 30-year-old engineering student from Brisbane, comments that when playing Nimblebit’s Star Wars tie-in Tiny Death Star, ‘I got sucked into that for a while, and then realised the pointlessness of it and then went on to something else’. When asked what appealed to him in the first place about such games, and why they lose that appeal, Jonathan expanded,

I think it’s the initial sense of progression. You know, you feel like you are working towards something, and then you want to see what’s coming next, even though you know it’s not going to be anything particularly different to what you’ve already seen but it pulls you in a little bit like that. But then after a while you sort of realise that you are seeing the same thing over and over again.

Luke, meanwhile, a 36-year-old public servant in Brisbane, has been playing Adventure Capitalist, a game that simply asks the player to tap on lemons to receive money, which in turn can be spent on managers that tap lemons automatically, accruing the money at a faster rate to be spent to accrue money at an even faster rate. ‘I’m surprised at how addicted I am to it’, Luke confesses. ‘It’s just pushing buttons. There’s almost no skill or knowledge involved in it as well’. Interestingly, Luke estimates he has spent between AUD30 and AUD40 (he is unsure of the exact amount) in order to speed up Adventure Capitalist’s timers: ‘Because it is all just maths, I figured it out. If I sit on it, it is going to take me X number of days to do it, or I can just spend $4 and do it straight away’.

Here, both Jonathan and Luke demonstrate the potentially exploitative aspects of free-to-play design central to background games that Bogost and other critics are wary of: rather than setting an achievable end goal, such games aim to keep players fixated on the incremental and perpetual work of building and accruing, at times perhaps inducing the impatient player to spend a few dollars to speed up this or that activity but never with the purpose of escaping or beating the system and ending the game. On one hand, both Jonathan and Luke are reflexively aware of the ‘pointlessness’ of the background games they play, insofar as there is no ultimate goal and tasks are mundane; on the other hand, both describe being induced to continue playing despite this awareness, even to the extent of spending money to speed progress towards no eventual objective.

Yet other participants in our study reflected on the pleasure and satisfaction they experienced as an effect of the repetition, incrementality and real-time delay of background games. Much as Peter above described his labour over SimCity, a 49-year-old university lecturer and mother of two children Lucy told us of her ongoing ‘obsession’ with Godus which lasted for over a year. Lucy was quickly aware that it was possible to pay for gems and resource packs to progress further in the game (primarily, by acquiring new and unexplored land or speeding up building and mining tasks), but she enjoyed the challenge of never having to pay, and the reward gained by waiting, often for several days for tasks to be completed. She commented,

It was basically a resource management game, which I’ve always disliked playing, but there was something about the way you could sculpt the land, and set your little workers to build or mine, that was really satisfying. I would have the game open on my iPad all the time, and visit my land ten times a day at least, just to see how far the workers had progressed. I got much more satisfaction from waiting than paying money not to wait.

This kind of player gratification (gained from waiting instead of paying) was reiterated by many of our participants and challenges the view that background games are either inane (at best) or transparently exploitative (at worst). It is clear from our interviews that although players are aware of (and occasionally succumb to) the commercial imperatives that underpin the waiting mechanics of such games, they do not feel exploited or manipulated by the freemium purchasing model. On the contrary, it is often the real-time waiting that effectively provides players with a sense of enjoyment and a satisfying gameplay experience.

Nevertheless, it was often the case that the decision to not spend money on such games was reflective of the game’s ambiguous status as a ‘real game’. Jenny, for instance, occasionally spent money on Blizzard’s iPad card game Hearthstone, but refused to spend money on games such as Family Guy. When asked why, Jenny suggested that it might be because she considered Hearthstone a ‘proper’ game:

It has a – what’s the word – not legitimacy, but it’s a genuine hobby. The equivalent of paying for Magic: The Gathering cards. So I feel like it is an actual investment, and I feel like the people who play the game would feel the same way. Whereas with the Family Guy game, which I see as just as fun-time game … if I spend money on clams [the premium currency] no one would actually be impressed by that.

This was a common attitude among those interviewees who played both casual mobile games and more committed console or desktop games; that is, players define and experience games across a spectrum of ‘worthiness’ (in terms of time, money and commitment), sometimes reflecting the view that casual and mobile games are trivial, yet at other times distinguishing in a more nuanced way between different kinds of made-for-mobile games and the variable modalities of mobile gameplay. ‘I would pay for something that feels like an investment, but not something that feels like a distraction’, Jenny elaborated.

For Luke, in addition to the money he has spent on Adventure Capitalist, he occasionally buys ‘donuts’ (the premium currency) in Simpsons: Tapped Out in order to obtain new characters. However, he expresses a sense that most of the characters are simply too expensive and prefers to go through the longer and more tedious process of accrual:

So, for example, this one is 132 donuts, that’ll get me essentially one building with a character attached to it, so that’s like paying $13 for that character, which I think is too much. So I’m just going through and accruing donuts naturally, which is what you do by levelling up.

As these participants describe, while background games might be considered a trivial distraction by those who play deeper, bigger or more engaging games, for others they provide a gratifying game modality that fits easily into the busy-ness of everyday life. Indeed, it is the very fact that they are experienced as trivial distractions that makes them so appealing to many of our interviewees, as they permit a low stakes and easily relinquished or pausable mode of momentary relaxation. Moreover, although some players endure the waiting that such games demand because they are ‘not worth spending money on’, for others it is the waiting dynamic that in itself imbues their gameplay with a sense of achievement and progression. In a game where waiting is playing, paying to ‘not wait’ can mean paying to not play. The process of waiting is here coupled with a sense of both playing for free (i.e. that one is beating the game) and a perception of persistent progress (i.e. that one is playing while waiting), dynamics that are central to the ambient experience of play that background games afford.

Conclusion

In this article, we have drawn from interviews with mobile game players to conceptualise and interrogate the genre of ‘background games’. We began by articulating a definition of background games as those digital games that run in the background of a device’s or game server’s processing power, progressing with tasks and accruing resources while the player continues with their everyday life activities. Such games also run in the ‘background’ of the player’s attention as a mode of ambient play, to which the player’s focus returns in moments throughout the day. In the first section, we connected background games to a longer history of both social and casual games, and considered the critical commentary such games have often received for being exploitative or, occasionally, not actually games at all. Against such generalizations and assumptions about player types and the experience of background games, we have argued that it is important to consider how games are played in situ and the complex pleasures players negotiate across a range of modalities, rather than perpetuate divisions between legitimate and unworthy gameplay.

In the following section, we considered how background games can be compared to social and casual games, and the complex way mobile devices are caught up with the phenomenon of ‘waiting’. Whereas many so-called ‘casual’ mobile games (e.g. Angry Birds) can be played in moments of waiting (between daily activities), background games incorporate the need to wait into their playing. Here, our participants explained the various ways that background games are integrated into their everyday lives both in the home and at work. As we suggested, background games are an exemplar of ‘ambient play’ and allow us to further examine and interpret the relationship between quotidian practices and mobile play.

The final section of this article turned briefly to the complex issue of play and labour as they are challenged by background games. On one hand, background games seem a distillation of a very neoliberal form of capitalist labour, where the player must either perform menial tasks for hours on end to no avail or pay money in order not to work at all. Such critiques are complicated by the experience of our participants, however, who consistently expressed a sense of satisfaction in the act of waiting for the menial tasks to be completed, even setting the self-imposed goal to never spend money. It is clear that even within the parameters of background gameplay, there is an unstable, player-specific and context-dependent relation between immaterial labour, mobile media practices and the often conflicting, pleasurable and commodified nature of games and play.