The Best Video Games of 2020

In the Before Times, on transatlantic flights, I would often assume the role of a deadly virus that threatened the human race. The key to success in the game Plague Inc., from 2012, is to mutate in ways that both hasten the virus's spread and impede a vaccine's development. It was perversely enjoyable to pass an hour, forehead smushed against a window, swiping toward extinction. Much like transatlantic travel itself, role-playing a pandemic can appear, at the moment, to be rather unseemly. The medium is ideally suited to coronavirus lockdown, when the boundaries of the physical world contract and the imagination strains for freedom.