More Mobile: Gaming (Premium)

When I started my writing career in the mid-1990s, my mentor Gary shared with me some tips for being more productive. Among them, I was interested to discover, was a reward system: when he finished some writing milestone—a chapter in a book, perhaps, or a lesson plan for school—he would switch over to a favorite videogame to detune from work. He specifically mentioned playing Wolfenstein 3D in the year or two before I had arrived and explained how he had obsessed over finding all of the secrets in the game, playing levels over and over again.

This was fascinating to me at the time. As a member of the first generation to grow up with videogames—my first computer was the Entertainment Computer System (ECS) for the Mattel Intellivision, so I win most “first computer” contests—I was still quite active playing games, had just switched over to the PC from the Amiga, and was then eating up early DOS titles like Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM.

Today, I understand this process much better: It’s important to break away from work from time to time to clear one’s mind. In fact, this is key to being efficient at work, assuming you’re doing something with your brain, like writing. Just walking away will almost always suddenly trigger a thought or idea, or a word choice or phrase, that might have otherwise escaped you.

Getting over the guilt of not always working is part of it, for sure. But I’ve been doing this for decades, and the benefits are obvious: my writing production is enormous and efficient, and I’ve honed the process over time. And in recent years, I’ve always had two screens on or near my desk. But both aren’t connected to the computer: one is for work and one is for play. And the play screen has been connected to an Xbox since the Xbox 360 launched in 2005. That was the year I finally transitioned from PC gaming to console gaming.

But as I look ahead to the more mobile lifestyle I hope to achieve, I can see that this can’t last: I’m not going to cart an Xbox console and its enormous display around. And so something has to give. We’re not moving—and potentially moving into a persistent state of mobility—immediately, as we’ve pegged the first half of 2022 as the earliest possible time for this change. But I can take some steps in the interim. And maybe arrive at a midway point where I’m still in the same physical place, but with less stuff. And then move on to shedding almost all of it when we finally do move on.

Interestingly, I already took my first step towards a more mobile future in gaming this past year, and it’s possible that some of you witnessed it as it happened. Discussing headphones with Brad on First Ring Daily sometime in the past year—sorry, I can’t recall exactly when—I was explaining how I don’t like having big, can-style headphones covering my ears, and that I instead use the speakers built into my display or, depending on the time, external speakers. Brad told me that you lose a lot of information when you do that, and that, for the multiplayer games I play, especially, it’s better to wear headphones.

This triggered something: I use a cheap pair of Sony headphones* for podcasts, and I always have an extra pair around because the foam ear covers start loosening up and they become less comfortable. So I plugged an extra set into my Xbox Wireless Controller to give it a shot.

(* For some reason, these headphones are now $100 on Amazon[!]. I was paying $17 to $25 for them, and as you can see, something changed. My guess is that Sony doesn’t make them anymore.)

Well, I don’t get to say this a lot—kidding, kidding—but Brad was right. With headphones, you can hear what’s happening in more detail and more spatially. So when an enemy is sneaking up behind me in whatever Call of Duty game I’m playing, I can hear his footsteps and sidestep the attack. Even these (normally) cheap headphones are a huge improvement over the best speakers I could use. (Beyond a ridiculous 5.1 setup, of course.)

More to the point, using headphones like that eliminates the speakers. And that’s really the point of this exercise: to eliminate as much stuff as possible while retaining as much functionality as possible. So the addition of cheap and small headphones was a win-win: they are much smaller (and are quite portable), and they are better than what I was using before. Nice.

But I still have two big gaming-related items to contend with: the console, which these days is an Xbox Series X, and my display, which is a 28-inch BenQ 4K gaming monitor with HDR that I bought specifically for the Series X. And neither one of those is going on the road anytime soon. What to do?

I suppose I could replace the Xbox Series X with an Xbox Series S: the latter console is, after all, much smaller, and might even be considered semi-portable by some. And let’s face it, the games I’m currently stuck on—read: Call of Duty—probably don’t benefit too much from the Series X’s advantages because these games emphasize frame rates over graphical quality, at least in the multiplayer modes I prefer. (And having just tested the next Call of Duty, Vanguard, over the weekend, I can say that this game is pretty bland looking, even on the Series X, with no explosion of HDR colors or graphical fidelity.) I could tie that console to an external (and portable) display and maybe make an argument for packing it in a bag when we move around.

Maybe. But while I’m still in this home, switching to the Xbox Series S won’t buy me anything other than to help prove the above theory, I guess. I’m still just going to sit at a desk and work and play. The console under the desk doesn’t really matter.

But I could take two steps that would matter.

The first is moving away from that huge gaming display: If I could use a 15-ish-inch portable display with the Xbox, I could get rid of the gaming display and the filing cabinet on which it rests next to my desk. I like those space savings a lot, and I have tested this setup in recent days. I’ll be writing about portable displays soon, as I keep hinting for some reason. It’s not really rocket science.

The second is eliminating the Xbox altogether. And this one is … interesting to me. I could play games on the PC again, of course. And while that’s of some interest, the big blocker there, to me, is that I’m not particularly interested in gaming laptops, or in laptops that are powerful enough to play games that look at least as good as they do on a console. But I’m open to the possibility. I would consider it.

More interesting, perhaps, is the emergence of quality game streaming services in the past year or so, between Google Stadia, Amazon Luna, and, more recently, Xbox Cloud Gaming (previously called Project xCloud). As a long-time Xbox fan, I am of course most interested in Microsoft’s offering. And as is the case with portable displays, I’ve been experimenting with it again. Sadly, the experience is not good.

I can’t quite explain the why of this, but Stadia and Luna offer better overall performance than does Xbox Cloud Gaming today, at least in my home. What I mean by performance is “latency” or “lag,” for the most part, the ability to actually play a game and have things happen accurately on-screen in real-time. Stadia and Luna do a good job of this for the most part—possibly because of their unique approaches to controller connectivity, or perhaps through some networking wizardry—but Xbox Cloud Gaming does not. And I’ve tried every conceivable setup imaginable, including an all-wires configuration in which I’m gaming over Ethernet using an Xbox Wireless Controller directly connected to the PC with a USB cable, and via the native Xbox app.

And, the experience is terrible, unplayable. That this is still the case this many months into this ongoing experience is troubling. Xbox has the games I want to play. And the controller I prefer to use. And it just doesn’t work.

I will keep trying, of course. And I expect Microsoft to continue improving the quality of the service. But unless and until I can play the games I like—including the multiplayer games I really prefer—it’s just unworkable.

Yes, you can now stream games from an Xbox console to a Windows PC using the Xbox app. And that would let me play Call of Duty games—which aren’t part of Xbox Cloud Gaming—using my laptop’s display, saving me space. Assuming it works. Which … it doesn’t, and for the same reasons. The lag is horrific.

At this point, you may be wondering, why not just play games on the PC? Call of Duty is available on the PC, after all.

I may need to try that. Or finally ween myself off of Call of Duty, of course. I’m open to all of it. But it bugs me a bit that I can’t find a setup that I’m OK with and just works. It’s something I’ll probably continue testing for months to come. This one is still very much an open question.