By Richard MacRae, President and Publisher, Analog Game Studios | 8 April 2026
Picture a typical Tuesday evening. Dinner is finished. The kids have scattered to their rooms. You and your partner are on the sofa or maybe across from each other at the kitchen table, both of you there, both of you somewhere else entirely. Phones in hand, feeds scrolling, the room quiet in a way that isn’t quite peaceful.
You’re together. You’re also, in any meaningful sense, alone.
This is what we have come to call Digital Drift. Not a dramatic crisis. Not a fight. Just the slow, almost invisible migration of attention away from the people in the room, toward the device in your hand, the algorithm designed to hold it there and the hollow sense, at the end of the evening, that you are not sure what actually happened in the past two hours.
| Digital Drift is not a dramatic crisis. It’s the slow, almost invisible migration of attention away from the people in the room. |
The Numbers Behind the Feeling
If Digital Drift sounds familiar, it’s because it is. Statistics Canada’s 2021 Canadian Social Survey found that nearly one in four Canadians aged 15 to 24 report feeling lonely frequently, not occasionally, not sometimes, but often. A further three in ten Canadians of all ages say they sometimes feel lonely. These are not people without friends or family. They’re people with full contact lists and empty evenings.
A peer-reviewed meta-analysis published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, drawing on 148 studies involving more than 300,000 participants, found that social isolation increases the risk of premature death by 29 percent. That’s a greater health risk than obesity. It’s equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. The Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging, covering more than 51,000 Canadians coast to coast, confirmed that this is not a rural problem or an urban problem or a young person’s problem. It’s a universal one.
The U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic in 2023. The Canadian data suggests we are living through the same thing, quietly, from Halifax to Victoria.
What Presence Deficit Actually Is
We use the term Presence Deficit to name something more precise than loneliness. You can be lonely when you’re alone. Presence Deficit happens when you are not alone, when the people you love are right there and the genuine connection still doesn’t happen.
It’s the dinner table where everyone is physically present and no one is actually there. It’s the evening that slips by in parallel consumption, each person watching their own screen, scrolling their own feed with nothing shared except the postal code. It’s the slow accumulation of nights where you were together in every technical sense and together in no meaningful one.
The research describes this as the difference between social contact and genuine interaction. We’ve never had more of the former. We’re running short of the latter.
| Presence Deficit happens when the people you love are right there and the genuine connection still doesn’t happen. |
Why This Matters More Than We Admit
The insidious quality of Presence Deficit is that it does not feel like a crisis. It feels like a Tuesday. Nobody is fighting. Nobody has left. The relationship, the family, the friendship, all of it is technically intact and yet the thread between people, the actual fabric of knowing each other, is quietly fraying.
Parents who have not learned anything new about their children in weeks, couples who can reconstruct each other’s commute complaints from memory, but cannot remember the last time they laughed together, unexpectedly, over something neither of them planned. Friends who maintain a group chat that generates hundreds of messages a week and who, when they finally sit in the same room, realize they’ve run out of things to say that weren’t already said in the chat.
That’s not a technology problem. It’s a presence problem and it’s solvable, but not by putting your phone in a drawer and hoping for the best.
The Presence Score
Earlier this year, Analog Game Studios built and released a free public tool called the Presence Score. It asks twelve questions about your weekly habits, how much genuine face-to-face conversation you have, when you last learned something new about someone you love, how often your evenings match the ones you actually want to be having and returns a personalized score broken down across partner, family, and friends.
It’s not a quiz. It’s a mirror. And consistently, the people who have taken it report the same experience: they knew, in some background way, that things had drifted. Seeing it measured makes it impossible to ignore.
The tool is free, takes under four minutes, and requires no registration. You can take it at presencedeficit.com.
What Puts People Back in the Room
Analog Game Studios is a board game publisher. We’ve been one since 2019 and we’ve published eleven games in that time, but the reason we built the Presence Score and the reason we identify Presence Deficit rather than just selling games, is that we believe something specific about what a board game actually does, something that distinguishes it from almost every other solution offered to the problem of Digital Drift.
Consider the alternatives. Watching a film together is better than watching separate screens, but it’s a parallel experience. Two people consuming the same content at the same time, without interacting. A walk is good, a meal out is good, but neither one structurally requires you to engage with the other person’s choices, respond to their decisions, read their tells, or share the same moment of surprise.
A board game is different. Not because it’s more fun, though it often is, but because of what its mechanics demand. You have to be there. You’re not watching something happen; you’re making something happen, together, in real time, with the people across the table. You see how your partner thinks. You discover something about your child you didn’t expect. You remember, briefly, what your friend is actually like when they’re not mediated by a screen.
| A board game structurally requires you to engage with the other person’s choices, respond to their decisions, share the same moment of surprise. |
Presence-by-Design
Everything Analog Game Studios publishes is built around a principle we call Presence-by-Design. It’s not a marketing phrase. It’s the standard against which every game we consider publishing is evaluated.
A Presence-by-Design game requires every player to be genuinely engaged with the other players, there is no taking your turn in isolation while everyone else waits. It’s completable in less than 45 minutes, because that’s the realistic window most households have on a weeknight. It’s competitive in a way that feels playful rather than adversarial, because the point is the shared experience, not the result and it creates the conditions for conversation, laughter, and genuine revelation, the kind that happen when you play against someone rather than beside them.
Not every game on the market meets this standard. Some are beautiful. Some are brilliantly designed, but built for hobbyists with three-hour evenings and a tolerance for complex rule sets. Analog Game Studios games are built for the Tuesday evening that almost didn’t happen and the one that, because of a game on the table, turned into something worth remembering.
An Invitation
If any of this sounds familiar, if you recognise Digital Drift in your own evenings, we invite you to start with the Presence Score, not to be sold something, not to be told you’re doing it wrong, just to see, clearly, where the gaps are. The tool is at presencedeficit.com and it’s free.
And if you find your score lower than you hoped and you’re wondering what to actually do about it, we make games, eleven of them, each one designed, from the ground up, to put people back in the room with each other, interacting.
That’s what we do. That’s why we do it. Find your game with us.
