Excerpt:

While the shiniest, most successful phone apps are designed to push our competitive buttons and light up our pleasure centers with quick rewards, slow games seek access to a different part of our brains. They soothe rather than excite. The author and game designer Ian Bogost has referred to this genre as video game Zen, the mobile equivalent of running a tiny rake across a desktop Japanese garden. David OReilly, the filmmaker and digital artist who designed Mountain, calls these games “relax ’em ups,” a clever play on their departure from the ubiquity of first-person shooters. ThatGameCompany, the studio behind slow games like Cloud and Journey, strives to create “positive change to the human psyche.”

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