The great escape

It’s kind of telling that one of the few industries not affected – at least in terms of sales figures – by the COVID‑19 pandemic has been gaming. Generally, games sales have increased in recent months. The NPD Group – an American market research organisation – reported that software sales were up 34% in March from the same time the previous year, with hardware soaring a staggering 63% over 2019. Certainly, as the modern games industry hurtles towards a new generation of hardware like a wayward drunk, this is pretty much unprecedented.

So why is it happening? For my money, the rest of the world is waking up to what we’ve always known; games are an escape from everyday life. As hardware has become more advanced, we’re effectively experiencing theme parks in our own homes. Certainly, the games I played most during the peak of lockdown were VR titles; just to get that feeling that I’d gone somewhere and done something. Plus, of course, games are more communal than ever. You couldn’t go on social media over the past couple of months without seeing people inviting one another to visit their prized Animal Crossing islands.

Games have always been that way for me and

– I suspect – most of you. It’s why we’ve never given up playing them. It’s telling that most of the tough times in my life I can link a certain game to. Bugaboo The Flea (no, really), Underwurlde, Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare, Alex Kidd In Miracle World, the little-loved Rage… to name just a few of the games I disappeared into, so that I could – for a while – forget about the storms raging elsewhere.

I don’t know if it’s because games let you become someone else, or because they transport you somewhere new, or whether the cocktail of adrenaline and dopamine is a balm on a troubled soul, but it’s probably a combination of all those things. This year especially, when time seemed to slow to a crawl, having the opportunity to let rip with a pretend shotgun in Doom Eternal was exactly the fight-or-flight boost I needed.

Great art comes from adversity, so it’s going to be interesting to see how the pandemic impacts on the games we’ll be seeing a year or two from now. We tend to forget that games such as Jet

Set Willy, Monty Mole and Urban Upstart were products of their time. Not just because of their visual limitations, but they’re just three that were very much influenced – on a creative, imaginative, level – by the era in which they were created.

One of the big questions many creatives are now asking is whether to acknowledge the pandemic or ignore it. Do people want to be taken away, or do they want entertainment which reflects the world? I suspect it’s a mix of both; take us away, but don’t shy away from this insanity we’ve all lived through. It’s one of the few events in our lives which we can say we’ve all been through together.

Great art comes from adversity, so it’s going to be interesting to see how the pandemic impacts on the games we’ll be seeing a year or two from now