Tend a garden on your phone

They evolve from a game into a ritual, or even atmosphere.

Have a moment of Zen with slow-game apps .

All around the world, millions of smartphone users are preparing for war. “Pokémon Go” has sent players scurrying outside their homes to hunt cartoon critters, chuck virtual balls at them, and then groom their captured characters into a digital army.

Advance far enough in the game, and players are invited to join a Pokémon team and stage faceoffs at designated gyms — basically, virtual forts — where battle-ready competitors descend to hold their phones with a whiteknuckle grip, stare unblinkingly at the screen and tap furiously on one another’s Pokémon in a bid to seize control of the territory. Or not. Users can also just lazily check for Pokémon as they proceed throughout their days, stopping occasionally to scan the app for nearby characters and snapping screen shots on their commute or evening stroll. Marinate on this lower level of game play, and “Pokémon Go” feels less like a competition and more like a charming little interlude.

In this way, “Pokémon Go” has become the rare app to unite the two extremes of the mobile gaming universe. One is the compulsive, rank-obsessed land of “Candy Crush” and “Clash of Clans.” The other, its antidote — the serene, score-free world of so-called slow games.

Slow games are less ubiquitous and straightforwardly tantalizing than traditional mobile games. They often seem to lack any point at all. Instead, they invite players to engage in simpler virtual pleasures — taking a stroll, watering plants, feeding stray cats.

In the game “Mountain,” the user plays God, designs a world, then watches powerlessly as “time moves forward,” “things grow and things die” and “nature expresses itself.” Download “Viridi” to start a succulent garden in your pocket. Then just check in every few days to collect new seedlings, water thirsty plants and watch them grow. And with the Japanese mobile sensation “Neko Atsume: Kitty Collector,” you can fill a little yard with toys and kibbles that attract stray cats. It’s like installing a window into a cat cafe on your phone.

In these games, the stakes are lowered to nearly imperceptible levels, eliminating the weight of responsibility involved in actual caretaking. “Barmark,” a mobile app that invites users to play groundskeeper to their own virtual ecosystem, promises “no goals, no points, and no death.”

And it’s no coincidence that many slow games are set in a virtual backyard. If “Pokémon Go” has brought the thrill of video games into the great outdoors, slow games bring the feel of nature into offices, grocery aisles and subway cars. My succulents and strays grow and play for me in exchange for just a few screen taps a day.

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.

“Neko Atsume” is my coping mechanism of choice. Six months after downloading the app, the simple act of checking in on my cats a few times a day has relaxed into a mindless habit embedded amid all my others — check email, check Twitter, feed cats. I’ve already collected each of Neko Atsume’s 56 cats — the ostensible point of the game — but I keep playing. It’s evolved from game into ritual, or even atmosphere. It’s the new smoke break.

While desktop and console slow games have been around for years (the dreamy, moody indie puzzle game “Cloud” had its debut in 2005), there’s something particularly entrancing about a slow game on a mobile device. In the early days of the iPhone app store, “Koi Pond” became a surprise mobile blockbuster upon its release in 2008. The app offers a placid setting with just a touch of interactivity: It invites you to stare down into a clear pool of water, tap the surface and watch as a school of koi scatter from sight and then slowly return to repopulate the screen.

The next year, the company behind “Koi Pond” released “Distant Shore,” a game in which you stroll along an endless beach, collecting seashells, writing messages to put in bottles, then chucking the bottles into the surf. As you walk, you find bottles written by other players from around the world and read their messages, too — it’s a random, rarefied form of communication you can’t often find on social media. Now, the app store is sprinkled with dozens of tranquil smartphone portals that are antidotes to the maddening intensity of traditional video games and the quickening pace of online life.

But in another way, slow games are less a rejection of high-octane internet culture than they are a capitulation to it. By freeing up gamers from the burdens of extreme concentration and physical control, slow games allow us to fit a mobile game into every spare moment, to seamlessly multitask among Facebook monitoring and texting and the game play.

And while “Pokémon Go” may beckon casual players with the opportunity to collect cute characters around town, the game can also seduce many of them into more advanced, obsessive, competitive play. These slow games, as the Davidson College professor and video game researcher Mark Sample told me, “fit into the interstices of our lives.”

The rise of slow games on mobile has allowed us to “play games about waiting while we’re waiting,” he said, adding, “It’s kind of perverse: Slow games aestheticize the experience of waiting.”

Slow games offer a release, but their escape is on a screen, too. Run out of lives in “Candy Crush” and you can check on your aloe plant, tend your garden and feed the cats.

BENJAMIN NORMAN / THE NEW YORK TIMES Richard Leong (background, left) and his co-worker Wai Lam play “Pokémon Go” on their lunch break, outside the Empire State Building in Manhattan. When undertaken as a slow game, “Pokémon Go” can soothe rather than excite — accessing a different part...

GEORGE ETHEREDGE / THE NEW YORK TIMES Justin Sablich plays “Pokemon Go” at Central Park in New York. One reason for its massive success is its ability to appeal to hardcore competitors and fans of slow games.