Learning To Live With Laptop Gaming
It’s not just a change of hardware; it’s a whole new mindset
One of my earliest memories of life itself is playing an old DOS game on the family computer. It was an educational game which could manage to display both black and green pixels at the same time! Back in those days a personal computer would set you back around £1,000, and the monitor took up so much desk space that we had to slide a smaller table in front of the desk just to make room for the keyboard and mouse.
These days though, for less than £400 you can buy yourself a computer that will fit in an average-sized briefcase and is more powerful than a 7th Gen console. This means that you could carry most of your video game collection with you in to town, set up in the corner of a coffee shop and start a new Dark Souls speed run while having your lunch.
There are many reasons someone may want to swap to a portable machine for gaming purposes. People who travel for work and spend their weeknights alone in a hotel room may want to pass the time with a few hours of Doom Eternal, or maybe they want to spend their 3-hour flight invading foreign countries in Total War. Maybe someone is having to move in to a smaller home that won’t allow space for a proper desk, and need something that is more versatile in it’s placement. Or maybe someone wants to switch from consoles to PC, and the idea of buying a laptop with a model number they can look up for reviews feels like a safer option than trying to learn how to build one from scratch.
These are all valid reasons to want to swap your hulking, multicoloured, dust-gathering desk clutter for a smart little slab that you can take to the sofa with you, and there are a multitude of other reasons to make the switch. I had to swap to a laptop after deciding to pack my life into a campervan with my partner and go travelling for a year, which ended up being much longer after getting stuck in lockdown in a foreign country. We needed a laptop to create videos of our trip and to run our blog site, and I knew that any laptop that can efficiently run video editing software would be more than capable of running my favourite games. Win-Win.
Unfortunately, I didn’t find “Laptop Life” to be the sacred solution to my needs. I honestly don’t believe that gaming on a laptop can ever be equal to gaming on a desktop computer. A desktop setup is designed around decades of ergonomic research and development, with the height and size of the desk itself working with a proper, purpose built office chair allowing for comfort and good posture while you sit and slay demons for hours on end. Then there’s the heat that they generate, meaning that if anyone takes the name literally and games with the machine on their lap, they’ll be forgiven for thinking they’ve poured fresh coffee down there. Admittedly this might be seen as a plus if you happen to be visiting Scandinavia in the winter, but any trips to warmer countries will see the laptop develop a greasy layer of sweat from your wrists whenever you’re using the keyboard.
Then there’s the battery life, which websites will often quote as being around 6 or 8 hours. This often refers to the time it takes to drain the battery from 100% with the machine sitting idly with the brightness on minimum. The two laptops I’ve had on my trip, after one was stolen, both had similar battery lives, and watching a 40 minute video from the hard drive would drain about 20–30% of the battery. Any graphically intense game would be lucky to run for an hour before the laptop starts crying for a power supply. I could usually get about 3 or 4 hours of video editing done before needing to plug in again, and admittedly a full charge can be expected to only take about an hour. But still, it means you can never really rest easy unless you’re within sight of an available plug socket.
While I’m of the opinion that laptop gaming can never be a reasonable substitute for desktop gaming, I do believe that it can be a perfectly viable additional option for certain types of games. Despite being determined to prove myself wrong, I have come to the conclusion that I cannot play the games I would have been playing had I been with my desktop PC all this time. Doom Eternal will have to wait until I can get back to my desk, as will Cyberpunk 2077, which will be released before I can legally start travelling home. Throughout our trip, my partner and I have been adding every free game from the Epic Games Store to our libraries, knowing full well that we will have to wait until we are at proper PCs again before we can play the majority of them. Because it’s not only graphical powerhouses that aren’t really suited to laptop gaming, it’s entire genres too.
I enjoy a good 2D side-scrolling game, with Blasphemous being one of the games I had hoped to play on this trip, what with it being a “metroidvania” game with a level of graphics that should barely register more than a slight whirr from my laptop. However, due to having less chances to play, and those sessions being shorter and prone to disturbances, I could barely make any progress at a time, and I kept coming back to it not remembering where I was going or what I was doing. I found similar issues playing XCOM, where I thought the mission structure would allow me to dip in and complete a mission every so often, as they usually take about 15 minutes each. While this was true, trying to keep track of your progress along research trees, resource gathering and your long-term goals in general proved next to impossible when I had to wait a week until I got a chance to play for 20 minutes. It’s for that same reason I deleted Surviving Mars before even playing it, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to put the time in to learning how to play a new game and then actually remember how to do anything.
I found myself craving some hypothetical game that was fundamentally simple, that I could dip in and out of without having to refer back to notes to remind myself what I was supposed to be doing, but could still be working towards some greater goal. It was then that I remembered that “rogue-likes” are a thing.
FTL, Rogue Legacy, Dead Cells, The Binding Of Isaac, Enter The Gungeon, the list of options became staggeringly high, but these are the ones I stuck with for a while. Simple games that challenge you to make more progress than your last run, and no complicated mechanics or options that you might forget about after an extended period away from them. I’ve still not managed to complete any area in Rogue Legacy other than the initial castle zone, but because it’s a different layout every time, it doesn’t feel like a slog, and if I only play for 15 minutes, I’ve still made progress towards increasing my armour level or my HP bar.
My partner and I also realised that we had acquired a few digital board and card games through the Epic Games Store, with Ticket To Ride and Carcassonne being personal favourites of ours. The laptop is actually advantageous with these games as when it’s the other player’s turn, you just pass the computer over to them.
From this, I concluded that laptops and the situations that necessitate them mean that these sorts of games are best matched to the “on-the-move-again” nature that a laptop computer facilitates. But that was before we both decided to try a game that we had both heard about and yet never played, Stardew Valley.
The game design of Stardew Valley is worth of its own article, but it’s a farming game that lets you set yourself short-term tasks that work towards mid-term goals that build up to a big, long-term objective. When implemented alongside a save system that essentially breaks the game down in to 12 minute sessions, it allows players to drop in for a little bit and make some progress, while just as easily allowing for people to play for hours on end if they choose to.
Stardew Valley is by no means the only game with an excellent gameplay loop that suits the shorts bursts of gaming that a laptop is suitable for, but in my opinion it is one of the best examples of it. If you like a little bit more action in your games, Heat Signature is a space-bounty hunter game where contracts can be completed in about 5 minutes before returning to base and spending your ill-gotten gains on upgrades. Starbound is almost a combination of both of these games, where you can choose to build and maintain a farm, stop an apocalyptic evil, go spelunking for fossils or hunt dangerous animals across the galaxy.
The fact is that laptops are just not as well suited to gaming as a desktop PC for a wide variety of reason. While you will be perfectly capable of playing the latest blockbuster releases, after an evening of playing them you’ll be reduced to a sweaty lump with mild back pain.
However, if a laptop is the only way you can fit gaming into your life, change your expectations, and dive head-first into a world of games that you may have never known existed, and that allow you to make meaningful progress with whatever amount of gaming time you’ve managed to make for yourself.
