Playing a video and a full screen game on a single monitor

Problem:
Wanting to play a full screen video game while also watching a video, on one monitor, minimalistically.

Solution:
Windows:
First, your game must be running in either windowed or windowed-fullscreen mode. This allows things to be drawn "on top" without minimizing the program.
 - Sometimes you can force a fullscreen game to run in a window by creating a shortcut to the .exe that launches the game, and appending -w -windowed in the shortcut target
-- It would look like "c:\program files\yourgame\game.exe" -windowed
--- so, find your game, right click and then "send to desktop" you should have a shortcut on your desktop. then right click on that shortcut you've just created, find the target and put -w or -windowed after the path, outside the quotes.
-There is also a trick that sometimes works, by making your desktop the same resolution as the game, it doesn't minimize when things are drawn on top.


Windowed-fullscreen is ideal, but requires games support that feature. This gets rid of the bar and max/minimize buttons, as well as draws the game on top of the task bar.

Then you'll need VLC player. Why? Because it plays most everything and at the end of this article will be much more 'slick' than a standard player-- read on!

So you've got your game and you've got VLC.

Open VLC and create your playlist in it. Or, just drag the videos you want to play into it.

When the it starts playing, right click on the video space, and choose the "view" subsection, select the following options:
Always on Top
Minimial Mode

now resize the video to fit where you'd like it, and play your game. VLC should stay on top and not have any unnecessary clutter. click on the video and hit space to pause, 'n' for next, 'p' for previous and scroll the mouse wheel (or control + up and down arrow) to control the volume of whatever you're playing.