There are two types of people in the world. Those who play games on the toilet, and those who pretend they don’t. I am a proud member of the former category. I realise this may not be the most “Guardian” of Guardian article openings, but we all use the toilet and we all play games; I am merely providing a Venn diagram.
We used to read books in there. I even had a small bookcase in mine, and am old enough to remember when a workplace was not considered civilised unless there was a copy of that day’s newspaper in every cubicle so that hard working staff could catch up with global goings on during their five minutes of down-the-pan time.
Once we felt confident to admit we were all reading in there, the toilet book became a publishing phenomenon. Whether this was implicit in the case of, say, QI: The Book of General Ignorance or explicit in the case of Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader. Both provided snack-sized nuggets of erudite entertainment that made bathroom visits doubly productive.
Phones changed all that. Soon grown men were whipping out their Nokia and playing with a different kind of Snake. Floppy newspapers made way for Flappy Birds.
My own toilet gaming predated phones, beginning with Nintendo Game & Watch. A couple of my school chums were lucky enough to own them, and I’ve yet to see a greater example of true friendship than someone allowing you to take their Oil Panic handheld into the privy. Before that I used to make up a game where I would see how fast I could start and then stop the stopwatch on my Casio digital watch. My record was 0.07 seconds. But I was a younger man then.
Ironically, dedicated handheld gaming machines never worked in there for me. The Game Boy was too large and fancy and there was no point entering with a Game Gear or Atari Lynx because the batteries wouldn’t cover a single visit.
The Game Boy Advance SP was a quantum leap in toilet gaming because it was small and discreet with 10 hours of battery life. But that’s where I learned the pitfalls of toilet gaming. It needed to be an undemanding game you could play in bite-sized chunks. Advance Wars nearly killed me. The later missions had me sitting there so long that when I tried to get off the seat my legs would be asleep and I’d topple over like a rotten tree in a forest. Thankfully, no one else was in there to hear, so I didn’t make a sound.
In the modern world, the toilet is conducive to gaming because there are no distractions. No one is bothering you in there. And, equally importantly, it is guilt free. Parenting begets gamer’s guilt. You always feel you should be doing something more “worthwhile”. Helping the kids with school stuff or working harder to ringfence their future from the slings and arrows of an outrageously fragile world. The toilet becomes a mini oasis of isolated tranquility and undisturbed gaming where you answer the call of nature rather than the yell of parenthood.
Zenith … Lego Hill Climb Adventures. Photograph: Fingersoft
My toilet gaming has increased the older my children get. I refuse to fix our noisy bathroom fan because it’s the only thing that drowns their voices out. In recent times Alto’s Adventure, Pocket Run Pool, Prune, NFL RB25, Pocket Card Jockey and Marvel Snap have proved perfect bathroom companions that you can skim the fun from without sitting there so long that your family reports you missing. The absolute zenith of my toilet gaming is Lego Hill Climb Adventures, which I use when I pop into the powder room to cope with workplace stress. (As much as I love Balatro you don’t have time to win a game without getting pins and needles, but you do have just enough time to lose one.)
Gaming is so immersive it helps you forget the outside and what you are in there to do. That’s why we started reading in the first place: as a bowel-loosening distraction from the business at hand. I started gaming as a child, with our ZX Spectrum set up in a cupboard. I could shut the door and escape from parents who constantly and loudly fought into an alternate world where problems could be solved. That’s why games appealed to me in the first place. I am glad they can still do the same nearly half a century later in the smallest, safest room of all.