On Video Games In A Pandemic

This year has been the strangest of my life, and unless you’re a billionaire who brazenly flouts the rules (and let’s be honest they all do), then I’m guessing yours has been too. Scroll through any social media feed and you’ll see that the ways people have been coping with these “unprecedent times” are as diverse as the individuals posting them: baking bread, buying Pelotons, getting dogs and cats and increasingly nihilistic world views. 

But I haven’t done any of those things (well, maybe the last one). I don’t have the patience for bread, the money for a Peloton, or the room for creatures in the tiny apartment I share with my girlfriend. No, my pandemic coping activity has been something I already did with some regularity that I now do with extreme regularity: play video games.  

What I find most soothing about video games is the structure. The real world is absolute chaos right now. Norms, traditions, rules all thrown out the window. But games, man… games give you structure, they give you a sandbox with set rules, clear goals, scores and ways to measure your progress. And now, more than ever, they give you a way to socialize without worrying if you’re breaking the law or putting yourself in danger. 

In the before-times, I played sports…a lot. Monday nights were volleyball, Tuesdays were basketball, Wednesdays (my favorite) were softball. Those nights along with random pickup games and golf with my dad were my main forms of socialization. Once you’re done with school and you and all your friends have jobs (or not) and significant others (or not), it becomes so much harder to just say, “Hey, wanna hangout,” with no plan or end goal. Every hangout has to be scheduled, have a purpose, be structured. My sports leagues gave me, and many of my friends, exactly that. A time and a place where we’d gather for an hour or two, every week. And it was wonderful.

But then it all stopped. I remember the last volleyball game we played in early March. Things were weird, everyone seemed preoccupied. We made jokes about not high fiving. Then the next week the NBA shut down. The rest of the world followed soon after. All of my socializing was gone, with no clear idea when it would come back. 

Thankfully, video games crashed through the wall to save the day. It doesn’t matter what we’re playing: a couple games of Rocket League, a few rounds of Apex Legends, some random online parlor game. Whatever it is, we have a few minutes (or hours if we’re lucky), where we can shoot the shit, laugh about each other’s fuck ups, and periodically ask, “how ya holding up?”

It may not be the same as throwing a softball on an emerald diamond under the lights on a warm summer evening, spitting seeds and drinking beers. But for now, it’s as close as we’ll get, and during times like these that’s good enough for me.