Help your mage graduate or ignore them completely
I'm not sure I can imagine greater horror than that of the "desktop idle sim". My computer's desktop already fills me with confusion and dismay. It's a mixed media moraine of reaction gifs, rogue ebooks, abandoned drafts, and shortcuts for apps I uninstalled years ago. It is like seeing my life's failure reflected in the compound eye of the fly nibbling on my corpse. And now, you would have me run a small widescreen videogame at the bottom of the view? Madness. A small widescreen videogame about a mage attending mage school? Well, all right then. But give me a few seconds to at least sort by Item Type.
"Pick a coven, manage your daily routine, learn spells, make friends, embark on adventures, and pass exams on your way to graduation," is the Steam page summary for Abracademia, which now has a demo. You start by conjuring a wizard from a selection of haircuts, skin tones and base magical aptitudes. Then off you go to live out five whole years of school, mastering over 300 spells across 20 disciplines, while befriending, romancing or alienating other students. "Your wizard lives their life at your pace," the Steam page reassures. "You can micromanage every little detail or let magic handle the rest." It's all very sweet and smiley, probably to the point of sickly.
It seems quite intricate as these things go. There is talk of "crazy synergies", which I guess describes both the social chemistry and the spell combos. Once you're done with the books and classroom banter, there's also the chance to go on quests in "the Fabric of Worlds, a place where magical realities meet".
I'd love it if that "Fabric of Worlds" were just the computer desktop outside of the game's window. Let's see these apprentice sorcerers overcome my giant folder of unfiled expense claims... which is actually a giant folder of photographs of lampshades, for some reason. Look, my affairs are complicated. As long as they stay out of my Downloads folder, they'll probably be fine.
The full game is "coming soon". I confess, I'm not sure even the charm of wizard schooling is enough to sell me on idle games, though I am interested in their existence. The "idle" thing is a misnomer, surely, in that these are inherently games that expect you to multitask – as the Steam page spells out, "Abracademia runs quietly while you study, watch videos, or play other games." They are designed for a world of fractured attention spans in which real idleness has become impossible.