In praise of games you can put down

The phone is not the console. You play it in queues, on trains, in the five minutes before dinner. A game that ignores this — that punishes you for stepping away — is fighting the platform.

My favourite mobile games save constantly, load in seconds, and never guilt-trip you for leaving. A cosy sim like Big Bass Studio nails this: you can drop it mid-cast and it's fine. A run-based deckbuilder does it another way, giving you a natural stopping point every few minutes.

This is partly why I'm wary of aggressive daily-login mechanics. They turn a hobby into a chore. The games I keep on my home screen months later are the ones that trust me to come back on my own.

Design for the interruption, not against it. Everything else follows.