There is an emerging genre of video games that sits just above your desktop’s task bar, leaving plenty of space for YouTube videos, work spreadsheets or even another game.
Rather than taking a break by turning to an endless scroll of social media or emails, plant a few blueberry bushes or check on your beehive in the idle-farming simulator Rusty’s Retirement and get back to work. Feed your Tamagotchi-esque creature in Nanomon Virtual Pet, which occupies a space just a bit bigger than a Slack notification.
Most of these games take up less than one-third of the screen. Cornerpond fits a fishing minigame into a space the size of a Discord notification. Whimside replaces your Teams alerts with Pokémon-like collecting and breeding.
Having a semiautonomous farm chugging along on the bottom of your screen could be more than a distraction. It might actually help you focus.
Natalie Coyle, a mental health researcher who covers the psychology of video games, said that constantly switching tasks — like moving from studying to answering texts to studying again to social media scrolling — is quite taxing to our brains. Scrolling social media takes up more cognitive resources than a few clicks on the same screen.
“These games can offer a happy medium between not staring at a textbook for eight hours straight and the mental exhaustion that can come with constantly getting ourselves back into the productivity zone,” Coyle said.
Dozens of bottom-of-the-screen games have been released since the breakthrough of Rusty’s Retirement, which has sold about 600,000 copies since April 2024.
The game’s creator, Jordan Morris, said he was inspired by Microcivilization, a city-building clicker game where the player’s actions all happen in a horizontal panel at the bottom of the screen. What if an entire game were within that panel, he thought. He made a prototype of Rusty’s Retirement in two weeks.
People can and do play straight through Rusty’s Retirement, but these types of games are meant to play themselves, at least in part. The time away from them is part of the appeal.
“The idle aspect means that you don’t have to pay too much attention to it,” Morris said. “You can do a few actions and then leave it to do its thing, and then, later, you’ll see your progress.”
Oscar Brittain, who developed Nanomon Virtual Pet, said it took a while to figure out the proper amount of desktop space to take up, both visually and mentally.
“I felt like it was important to visually represent the amount of your attention the game required,” he said.
Morris noticed early on in development that having Rusty’s Retirement open helped him stay focused on tasks. Little moments of waiting often interrupt the creative process. There is always something to compile, download or otherwise wait for. Usually, Morris would pick up his phone.
“That thing I was only supposed to wait for for a minute max has turned into five minutes,” he said.
Research suggests that little breaks to click around between tasks are beneficial to people. For some, it can be a motivating factor.
“I’ve done this myself in games like Spirit City,” Coyle said. “I was working super hard to the point where I didn’t even have the time for Pomodoro breaks, but seeing that I had unlocked a new minion gave me a precious few clicks of respite before going back to the task at hand.”
The Whimside developers Toadzillart and Tadpoly, who use pseudonyms to maintain privacy, said they did not necessarily develop their game as a productivity tool — it’s a bit less “idle” than other idle games — but they hear from players that it is the perfect reprieve from a working session.
“It scratches the itch of wanting to do a small thing when you’re working, like take a 10-second pause to do something in your garden or take care of your creature,” Tadpoly said.
Some of these games, though, are explicit about their use as productivity tools. Ilgin Sacan, who is co-developing the social productivity game On-Together, said the game mimicked a co-working space. It even has a built-in Pomodoro timer to help gamers who employ that popular focus method integrate their work and play.
“We’re already multitasking on our PCs all the time, so having games that live right on the desktop feels fitting,” Sacan said. “They align with how people want to mix work and play in the same space. It’s almost like giving a few pixels to the things you enjoy.”
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