Who would want to play a boring game? With the video game industry becoming more and more competitive, you might think that any gameplay that is even remotely boring would be stripped out so that only the fun parts remain, but Marcus Carter, a University of Melbourne PhD candidate, argues that seemingly boring mechanics have created a new style of play: multi-gaming.

In a blog post on Gamasutra, Carter defined multi-gaming as “simultaneous play of discrete games,” meaning people play more than one game at the same time. He uses the example of a player taking turns on Rome II: Total War on one screen while waiting to respawn in Battlefield 4 on another. While a respawn timer might be considered a boring mechanic, it gives players time, however short, to do something else.

Much like the “second screen” TV experience fought over by social media companies, the idea of multi-gaming evolved thanks to greater access to powerful devices and multiple screens.

“15 years ago, domestic gaming typically happened on a computer with a single screen,” Carter wrote. “Before the proliferation of smart phones, laptops, tablets and even TVs, this was (for most people) the only screen in the room where gaming was happening.”

He added, “The consequence is that games were, for the most part, the only register of engagement during play. From this we get the archaic notion of the ‘gamer’ as a nose-to-the-screen, fully immersed participant, making the quaint theses of late 90’s virtual world scholarship much more understandable.”

Carter specifically points to Eve Online as an example of a game that even fans might sometimes call boring, especially for tedious in-game activities like asteroid mining. For those unfamiliar, mining in Eve involves flying to an asteroid and firing lasers at it until either your cargo bay is full of minerals or the asteroid is empty. This activity requires minimal input from players and can last for hours, so many people multi-task by watching TV or, as Carter points out, playing something else.

While mining players might not be fully engaged in Eve, they are still playing the game, however passively, thanks to multi-gaming.

Carter wrote, “Rather than designing games meant to consume a player’s entire attention, maybe its worth designing games to be slow, tedious or even boring.”

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