What is Slow Gaming?

The quest log says go north. You go west. Not because you’re lost – because west looked interesting.

You loaded up Skyrim and didn’t do a single quest. You walked out of Whiterun, picked a direction, and just… went. You followed a river because you wanted to see where it ended. You watched the sun set over the tundra. Three hours later, you had zero XP to show for it and still had one of the best gaming sessions you can remember.

Or maybe it was Red Dead Redemption 2. You were supposed to ride to the next mission marker. Instead you stopped on a ridge, watched the fog roll through a valley, and stayed there for 20 minutes. Quietly, completely there.

Or you did something similar in Breath of the Wild, Elden Ring or Sea of Thieves.

Congratulations, you’ve been Slow Gaming!

Slow Gaming vs Slow Games

Before we get deeper into this, we need to make a distinction: Slow games are a design category. Journey, Flower, Dear Esther, Proteus – these are games built specifically for contemplation and have a specific vibe because of that. Víctor Navarro-Remesal wrote the definitive academic book on them (Zen and Slow Games, MIT Press, 2026). In it, games like these are described as reflective. The goal of the creator is for you to act differently than in mainstream games so you can have a unique experience through interactions and storytelling. And yes, they are perfect for Slow Gaming.

But Slow Gaming doesn’t necessarily need a Slow Game, as it’s an intentional act, a way of play by the player. It’s a behavior, not a genre.

It also happens when you take a game that was designed around quests, combat, and progression, story triggers – and you just ignore all of it to inhabit the world on your own terms.

Open-world games have all kinds of triggers that hunt the player, but there are workarounds to avoid them. Think Skyrim, where you are requested to talk to the Jarl of Whiterun, but if you refuse to go there, the dragons (whole point of the main story line) are not triggered, and they’ll never ambush you in the game. The more open the world is, the more options you have to refuse triggers.

The game doesn’t even have to be designed to tolerate such an act. You can probably Slow Game Call of Duty or Fortnite if you can avoid getting shot long enough.

Why the “Explorer” type is close but Doesn’t Cover It

When gamers hear about Slow Gaming, they usually say: oh, so you’re an Explorer! Richard Bartle defined 4 player types: Killers, Achievers, Socializers and Explorers. “Explorers delight in having the game expose its internal machinations to them.” They dig deeper, look for glitches and easter eggs, map the world and find the hidden rooms.

However, sitting by a campfire in RDR2 for 20 minutes pressing nothing – that’s not really exploring. You’re just present, in a reflective state.

Every player typology since Bartle has a piece of this – immersion, discovery, autonomy – but none describe the core behavior: a player deliberately refusing what the game asks them to do, to be in the world on their own terms.

Slow Gaming is a mode – something most players slip into occasionally, when the conditions are right. In the first hour you speedrun but next you sit by the campfire.

The Engagement

The games industry measures engagement through completion rates, session length, daily active users, and in-game purchases. By every one of those metrics, the Slow Gamer looks like a failure case. They didn’t finish the quest or they’re “idle.” And they are certainly not spending money on passes.

This engagement still counts however. You chose to spend 3 hours in a world for no extrinsic reason. No XP, no progression, no social pressure. You’re there because the world itself is worth being in.

That might be the deepest form of engagement a game can produce and the metrics have no column for it. Such types of engagements can also potentially turn into a strong memory that actually triggers recommending the game to others.

The industry has a word for players who don’t follow the designed path: lost. Most metrics can’t distinguish between someone who quit and someone who’s sitting on a mountaintop watching the weather change and having a reflective moment.

Jesper Juul documented this back in 2007 – GTA players who ignored the campaign entirely to wander, do stunts, and explore. He framed it as a design feature (open worlds enable freedom). The player’s choice to use that freedom for contemplation instead of chaos stayed somewhat unexamined. We should change that, so let’s see what terms we can solidify:

What Counts as Slow Gaming?

Slow Gaming is broad, but it has some boundaries:

It is:

  • Walking around a game without doing quests, just to be in the world (immersion)
  • Turning off the HUD and picking a direction to get lost
  • Taking screenshots of architecture in a game that pushes you towards violent action
  • Following an NPC through a city to see where they go
  • Stopping and meditating, contemplating on something while you are still live in the game
  • Playing a violent game as a pacifist – refusing combat to see the world differently
  • Using cheat codes not to actually make it easier to finish, but to escape the pressure of the game’s progression, quests, tasks.

It isn’t:

  • Speedrunning (the opposite intent: you are optimizing)
  • Grinding (following the designed loop, just slowly)
  • Rage-quitting with wandering (that’s frustration)
  • Farming (although is very close and relatable, farming is still about amassing resources)
  • AFK (obviously, you are not present at all)

And is it Slow Gaming if you don’t choose it consciously? Sometimes you’re questing and you just stop because something caught your eye like a building in the distance, and you are hooked. Or you play with a racing game and you stop and pull over at a random place and just sit there, having a moment. You didn’t decide to Slow Game, yet you drifted into it. Sure, that counts – the drift is the behavior recognizing itself.

Some players go further. They install mods that remove quest markers or they play violent games without killing anyone (sometimes super hard to do). They use cheats to strip out pressure systems so only the world remains. That’s evidence the need for this kind of engagement is strong enough to give it a name and practice it on its own right.

This Concept is Being Built

Slow Gaming as a named, studied practice is new. The academic side of game studies has mapped what makes a game reflective. Nobody has mapped what makes a player reflective – what triggers it, who does it, why some sessions become Slow Gaming sessions and others don’t.

We’re building that. A research and a vocabulary, and some practical guidance on how to slowmaxx games, even if that sounds like an oxymoron.

What we don’t have is the most important part: stories about your experiences. If you’ve ever loaded a game and done nothing the game asked you to do – your story is something we love to hear.

The quest log says go north. Tell us about the time you went west.

Sources

  • Navarro-Remesal, V. (2026). Zen and Slow Games. MIT Press
  • Bartle, R. (1996). “Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs”
  • Yee, N. (2007). “Motivations for Play in Online Games.” Cyberpsychology & Behavior
  • Juul, J. (2007). “Without a Goal.” In Videogame/Player/Text

This article is part of the Slow Gaming research project.