The games that got us through the pandemic

It has been 469 days since covid-19 cut us off from our colleagues. We've now logged more than 11,256 hours at home, but we've been far from idle. The past year-plus bathed the nation in stress and suffering, a number of us enduring it alone. And as we've self-isolated in our homes, separated by walls and miles from colleagues, friends and family, the distance strained the bonds that unite us and the calm that keeps us sane. As we observed and reported on a year embroiled by racial injustice, marred by an assault on Democracy and the deaths of 593,000 Americans from covid-19, it felt impossible to look away. Lest we be overwhelmed, it was also imperative that, from time to time, we did. For a number of us, video games provided a refuge, proxy worlds to inhabit while ours was unsuitable for life as we knew it. Instead of grabbing beers at a bar, friends paired up in multiplayer lobbies. 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.