THESE VIDEO GAMES WANT ONLY SOME OF YOUR ATTENTION

There is an emerging genre of video games that sits just above your desktop’s task bar, leaving plenty of space for YouTube videos, work spreadsheets or even another game.

- NICOLE CARPENTER

Rather than taking a break by turning to an endless scroll of social media or emails, plant a few blueberry bushes or check on your beehive in the idle-farming simulator Rusty's Retirement and get back to work. Feed your Tamagotchi-esque creature in Nanomon Virtual Pet, which occupies a space just a bit bigger than a Slack notification.

Most of these games take up less than one-third of the screen. Cornerpond fits a fishing minigame into a space the size of a Discord notification. Whimside replaces your Teams alerts with Pokémon-like collecting and breeding.

Having a semi-autonomous farm chugging along on the bottom of your screen could be more than a distraction. It might actually help you focus.

Natalie Coyle, a mental health researcher who covers the psychology of video games, said that constantly switching tasks — like moving from studying to answering texts to studying again to social media scrolling —is quite taxing to our brains. Scrolling social media takes up more cognitive resources than a few clicks on the same screen.

“These games can offer a happy medium between not staring at a textbook for eight hours straight and the mental exhaustion that can come with constantly getting ourselves back into the productivity zone,” Coyle said.