I picked up the console along with copies of “The Last of Us,” “God of War” and “Horizon: Zero Dawn,” and then I spent three months flying around covering the presidential campaign. My friend Chris - who for a long time worked at GameStop and who devoted an entire basement rec room of his old house to his game collection - informed me that you could get the system plus three of its best games for a Best Buy Christmas deal in 2019. The wisest pandemic purchase I made without knowing about the pandemic was a PlayStation 4. Alex Horton, National Security reporter The Warzone Widows finally have something to celebrate. Ben, the newest member of our team and a guy I’ve never met in person, just had a son. Drops have already dwindled since March, and for good reason. Maybe we’ll keep talking after we reprioritize our time in a post-vaccine world and drops become less frequent. In the game, thankfully, you never have to clean it. Blindfold me right now and I could disassemble an M4, like I have hundreds of times before. In some cases, we pick up weapons that we once carried ourselves. We search for a position to mount enfilade fire. We have different lives now, but when we maneuver against our foes, tactical lingo fires up long dormant parts of our brains, like an old pinball machine plugged into the wall. Sometimes a digital war story will lead to a real one. They all served together in the Marines in Afghanistan, and I served in the Army in Iraq. The team, assembled by my friend TM, is made up of infantry veterans. But there’s more substance below the surface. Mostly we succeed in making fun of each other. These are the games that got us through the pandemic. If only for a few moments, they helped us forget the burning world around us. They helped us reunite with familiar voices and even meet new ones. Games helped us approximate the world we lost, the time we wanted to spend with friends and family. And for that, in a year that was utterly and literally unplayable, we are grateful. In these moments, living more in the pixels and polygons of avatars than our own flesh and blood, we muddled through. It was certainly not better than a meal with friends, nor the embrace of a mother or father. It was no replacement for the real world we’d lost. Some filled their days with simple tasks, reveling in a routine of collecting resources to repay a world-renowned tanuki named Tom Nook. They donned headsets and delivered life updates in disembodied voices, along with descriptions of which players looked a little “sus.” Vacations were scrapped and replaced with byte-sized getaways to war-torn battlefields and post-apocalyptic hellscapes that somehow instilled serenity.
Instead of grabbing beers at a bar, friends paired up in multiplayer lobbies. For a number of us, video games provided a refuge, proxy worlds to inhabit while ours was unsuitable for life as we knew it.
0 kommentar(er)
