Following up to yesterday’s blog post about preferring shorter games, I wanted to call out something else that I’ve recently been reminded of which makes gaming much more accessible: quick resuming. I had forgotten what a difference it makes to be able to put a device to sleep in the middle of a game, and then be able to resume it from that exact point at a later time without having to navigate menus or wait for things to load.
I’m used to gaming on my laptop, which for all its wonderful benefits, has one big downside: I can’t just hit the power button and then come back to it the next day when I have a few minutes to spare. Instead, when I have finished a gaming session on my laptop I have to save and quit, then exit to the desktop so I can resume my other regular computing tasks.
On the contrary, the Nintendo Switch (I recently picked up a Switch 2, which I’ll talk more about on this blog soon) begs to be played. Not for hours on end, necessarily, but just a few minutes here and there. You have twenty minutes before you need to be at an appointment? Pick it up, start back exactly where you were the evening before, play for a bit, and then when it’s time to put it away simply press the power button. It will be waiting for you when you get back, as if no time has passed.
I have plenty of issues with consoles, and they are in many ways inferior to PC gaming, but they do have their perks. It’s so nice to buy a game, know that it’s going to work the exact way the developers intended, and be able to play it as much or as little as you want. Removing this additional friction is the difference between playing every day, versus playing a few times a month.