A game like the online shooter Destiny 2 offers hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of play, exploration and study. Set in an intricately designed sci-fi world, it tasks players with taking out wave after wave of alien enemies. It also rewards them for understanding a complex character progression system that involves completing ever-more-difficult goals and objectives, sometimes multiple times, in exchange for rarer and more powerful weapons and armor. You might not actually accomplish anything after a day spent checking off quests and gathering virtual materials, but you’ll feel like you did.
Game critics have noted the worklike nature of many modern games for years, not always favorably. But in a world of stay-at-home mass unemployment, even the illusion of accomplishment is probably better than none at all.
Indeed, the particular shut-in nature of our current crisis makes video games unusually relevant in a different way: What video games do better than any other medium is simulate places.
Open-world games like Skyrim, Red Dead Redemption II or The Witcher 3 are built around giant, explorable spaces, sometimes the virtual equivalent of hundreds of square miles, with elaborate geography and shifting weather. They can take days or weeks to fully explore and at their best can be unexpectedly beautiful, offering the opportunity to encounter animated versions of sun-dappled vistas or foggy mountain peaks, to wander through crowded city streets or stroll past others on well-trod footpaths. Games can give us someplace else to go.
That makes games useful in another way. Some of us are shut in alone. But especially in cities, many are now effectively trapped inside modest apartments with family or roommates, and little private space. Games offer a form of personal escape, a way to simulate being elsewhere from the confines of your couch.
And for those who are alone, games can also serve as social spaces, virtual fields of play for cooperative adventures or competitive contests. Many of today’s most popular games are online experiences that allow players to engage with friends as well as strangers, to forge digital versions of the same sort of bonds with teammates that can develop in the real world.
If you’re new at this, the cost of entry is fairly low: There are thousands of high-quality games available for phones, and many more available to download directly to your computer.
