What games do you play while watching TV?

I recently got a dual monitor set up for my PC/PS4. This is a good opportunity to do some gaming and video watching. What games do you think or do people find to play while watching TV? I know Rorie mentions WOW and TV go well together. Am thinking about FFXIV but not sure I wont to go down the addictive/take over my whole life rabbit hole!

I know this has some overlap with "What games for podcasting" but feel watching TV requires a bit more engagement.

Personally I've been really enjoying Slay the Spire or Into the Breach alongside something fairly mindless.

Plus they are both run based games, so if you lose focus and mess up you just play another.

Honestly nothing where the visual matters rather than the dialogue, i watch most of my XCOM and quick looks i don't care about while playing multiplayer games, but you can't trick yourself into thinking you got anything out of an episode of a show you were gaming during. podcasts however are another story. Any game where you're out collecting or searching for things (Assassins Creed!) works perfectly, and i actually put on the Beastcast while i play PUBG>

MMO's are good for it, FFXIV is great but it got a bit difficult for me to make progress after 80 hours, Black Desert Online also good, if you don't mind a few little free to play annoyances, Guild Wars 2 is full of voice acting which is great but interferes with everything.
I'm currently not playing any MMO's so my current "time wasting" games are Warframe, COD:WW2, just finished everything in Grow Up but that's only good for 7 hours, Tekken 7 but you'll be focusing too hard and will miss the stuff you were meant to be watching, Ride 2 which has been a god send, it's perfect for half watching stuff, working on getting gold in every event in the "career" mode, Viscera Cleanup Detail, because there's nothing intense about cleaning, For Honor, there's plenty of moments during online play for watching stuff, and lastly if i don't feel like playing any of those or i need to up my season rank, Rocket League.

For me it's any game you gradually work towards something with quite a bit of travel time between runs and there there is not much distraction by NPCs, but crucially where the game immersion is no longer important.

So Terraria, Minecraft, Diablo, Torchlight. I used to listen to podcasts a lot with Dark Souls too, but there's certain fights would get so intense that I would have to pause the podcast to pay attention. Immersion I think is probably the most important aspect. I couldn't for example imagine podcasting while playing Subnautica or something like Skyrim.

Yeah MMOs are good podcast/tv games. Life sims like Animal Crossing or The Sims also work well. I play Civ6 while catching up on my GB backlog sometimes.

The Division

Battlefield

Call of Duty

Enter the Gungeon

Dead Cells

You get the point

Destiny 2 served this purpose for me for about 40 hours. A second playthrough of Dying Light went well that way for me too. I've been trying to play Shadow of War that way but I think I like hearing the orcs talk too much to do that.

MLB The Show, Destiny before I fell off of it (I likely played the first game for so long primarily because it was a way to play something while listening to something else), at a certain point The Witcher 3 and God of War became suitable for this as well.

I’m old and male. Multitasking isn’t my thing.

I listen to music when working out and music or podcasts while working around the house. Games, movies, TV...I don’t multitask for any of them.

I like to play League of Legenda or Diablo II or III, Path of Exile, sometimes ill hop onto WarCraft III and play a tower defence.

Both for stuff i watch online of podcasts these apply.

I clicked on this topic for the avatar (allez! allez! allez!) but stayed for the subject. I feel like any MMO, non-cinematic RPG or RTS is perfect for multi-tasking or background T.V watching. The one thing I associate most with my days of playing Star Wars Galaxies and World of Warcraft was Nick at Night re-runs of Roseanne and Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

Card games. Also Total War Warhammer can have some pretty brutal turn timers, to the point of almost demanding a second screen experience.

Pretty much any game of which I'm already familiar with in one way or another.

@nutter said:

I can see old, but what does being male have to do with multitasking? I mean, the notion of playing a game with Netflix on a second screen, no, because I'm more inclined to watch the TV show or movie. But devoting a minimal amount of attention to a podcast while mainly focusing on a game... I'm guessing it's a millennial and younger thing.

@facelessvixen: It’s a generalization, but it TENDS to hold up.

Maybe women are better at it, maybe they’re more prone to do it, maybe they enjoy it more. But generally, whether it’s in a household, office, or personal setting, women tend to do it more.

There are a number of articles out there noting this difference. There area number that seek to prove or disprove the observation.

I’ve noticed this to be generally true in my upbringing, my own household, those of friends and family, as well as office and social settings.

As far as being old, I’m half-bullshitting. I’m in my late 30s. I’m more embracing my coming exit from the target demographic by saying it out loud rather than taking to hair dye and shaving my beard before folks notice it’s going grey.

JRPGs! You'd be surprised how quickly grinding can go when your primary attention is on something else.

I do not wach tv :D

I’ve moved away from trying to multitask over the past 6 months and have enjoyed my games a lot more.

This has led me to play less time wasting games but for a recommendation I would go for eve online, I watched most of mad men while mining on another monitor.

@theuprightman: @lourenco30:

My peoples!

Finally...I was beginning to think the whole world went nuts.

I usually have a walkthrough running in the background while I play certain games, not TV per se.

I only do this with simulation games though, like Euro/American Truck Simulator, MotoGP 18, RaceRoomRacingExperience and so on. I spend a large amount of time practicing in my racing sims, on learning the tracks and tweaking the vehicles. It's nice to have something in the background while you are trying to master something mechanically through grinding. When it comes to Euro Truck and such, it functions more or less like an alternative to the in-game radio.

Any type of Total war game and then in battle ill pause the youtube/tv

I agree with Rorie on WoW, for one.

The game I've gotten the most mileage out of while watching something or listening to podcasts is Elite: Dangerous. I've spent a lot of time doing taxi and mining runs while watching Netflix. I also listened to the entirety of last year's GOTY podcasts while playing Elite in VR.

More recently, I've been doing some watching while playing Monster Hunter World on PC.

My wife and I have been playing Stardew Valley Coop while watching either Big Brother, Giant Bomb, New Girl or Rooster Teeth's Let's Play. You can probably guess at who picked what to watch, but truthfully I like to watch her shows as much as she likes to watch mine which is super nice. In Stardew, I do the fishing, mining and help out on the farm, and she does the collection gathering, gifting and crop buying/planning.

It is super refreshing and really makes me feel good about our relationship that we can mutually enjoy these things together, and I love that Stardew is such a diverse and non-violent happy game that we can both find things we like to do in it while still doing it together. Takes me back to the days when we were dating remotely, playing WOW, and I was the Noble ex-Stormwind guard turned mercenary warrior and she was the peace loving herbalist priestess who saw goodness in my heart despite my rough exterior and taught me to do good for the sake of tipping the balance...yes we were on an RPG server, and yes I wrote fanfiction.

Grinding in Pokemon is a good way to get through boring wrestling matches.

I do not think, that it is a good thing to combine them ;D