I have a somewhat mixed relationship with gaming streams at the moment. On the one hand, having a recorded video of a virtual tabletop RPG session on can be a great mood-setter when I’m writing. It can really help as background when I’m doing boring household chores to give me something to listen to. On the other-hand I do find it hard to multi-task well, and often find myself missing whole sections of the on-going dialogue if I start to focus on my active task more.

It’s the same with recorded content like game reviews, I’ve been listening to quite a lot of Seth Skorkowsky’s RPG reviews this last month or so for example. Given the labyrinthine plots of most Call of Cthulhu modules, I often end up rewinding sections of the video to listen again to something I missed.

I used to listen to external music a lot when…