Design apps brightening my grim lockdown
First thing on my to- do list yesterday. Furnish an outdoor area for a popular pumpkin patch in Gretna, Neb.
Second thing. Help the Davis family set up for a warm Thanksgiving dinner celebration. ( The Davises live in Kyle, Texas, where there are currently 320 active COVID-19 cases, so the set- up should likely have included masks and hand sanitizer, but my instructions were silent on the matter.)
Oh. And maybe drop a purple lily in the Koi pond before breakfast to help the Shidai Inazuma there ascend into a dragon?
In case you have not guessed yet, none of these pumpkins, people, or fish are real. (Maybe the dragon gave it away?)
They are figments of my smartphone’s imagination.
The dreary, dull, and deeply depressing days of COVID have driven me into a weird obsession with design apps. Or maybe not so weird. When would choosing a beautiful rug to match the brilliant blue waters of a Bora Bora beach house ever not be preferable to facing a grey afternoon of paying bills while locked down in Toronto?
At the beginning of the pandemic, I turned to comfort foods ( both making them and eating them), which sustained and warmed the tummy. Then during the summer, I walked and swam a lot, feasting on the fresh smell of trees and the soft feel of water on my skin.
And then fall hit, case counts rose, and it was like my brain started yelling at me, “OK, you’ve given me the soothing smells and feels, but things are getting very grim, so I need to see pretty colours. NOW.”
Cultured people would have responded by taking up painting or virtual tours of the Louvre. I hit the app store and immersed myself in games that reward you for choosing the perfect puce pillow for a fictional powder room, or the smoothest rock for a Zen Koi pond.
And really the process of eyeing serene scenes, then fiddling with them to get the shades and visual textures just so, has proven immensely soothing — even when undertaken in the context of a game that could easily be characterized as one big consumerist ad for Pottery Barn.
( Do you love that rustic couch you just used to style a beautiful lounge for a charming flower shop in Portland, Oregon? You can buy it IRL — with real money — with a single click!)
To be clear, I have not broken out my credit card to purchase any actual beach hut furniture or koi pond paraphernalia because of my new hobby — a wise act of restraint for a person who does not own an actual beach hut or pond.
There is, however, the matter of gems.
You know, gems or gold or keys or star tokens or pearls. Whatever currency the games use to control how many stone lanterns or pieces of watercolour flower art you can buy at a time.
Run out? You can buy more nuggets ( or what have you) by making in- app purchases. Yes, you use real money to buy fake money to buy fake furniture for fake families celebrating fake milestones and festivals. Does this sound like the biggest possible waste of cash imaginable? It is, and yet I cannot tell you how tempted I have been over the past several months to shell out true dollars for a virtual chaise sectional to make an imaginary living room complete.
It is the first time in my
longing for control during this time is inevitable.
life I have truly had to talk myself down from buying something within a smartphone game.
If that is embarrassing, it is maybe a little less so because longing for pleasant environments during a pandemic is understandable, and longing for control during a pandemic — the ability to set up everything exactly the way you would like it, as opposed to watching powerlessly as things fall apart around you — is inevitable.
Yes, I would like to micromanage the precise placement of each Sakura petal in the fish pond, thank you very much, because I sure as heck do not get a say in designing an effective COVID testing regime or determining how and when COVID vaccines will be distributed. Or who gets sick and who stays well.
I am hoping there is no harm in all this design escapism, provided I can remain steadfast in my refusal to charge gems to my Visa.
But I also look forward to a time when real life offers more of the bountiful celebration, holiday parties, and stunning scenery for which I have been relying on my apps.