Of course, almost everything about 2020 has been strange. But I’m a game designer. So a lot of the strange things that I’ve been paying attention to have been games: the shapes they’ve fallen into, the slightly askew ways they’ve fit into our lives this year.
There were the months where everyone I knew was suddenly doing jigsaw puzzles, or playing Animal Crossing, or joining in on variably complex Zoom quizzes with their families (there’s nobody like a game designer for needlessly overengineering the process of asking and answering trivia questions for fun).
There were the sports around the world, professional and amateur, and the tournaments that were cancelled and the adjustments that were made: real-life Formula 1 racers playing the official Formula 1 videogame for an audience, baseball teams filling the empty seats in their stands with huge soft-toy Pokémon or lifesize cardboard cutouts of their fans.
And there were the specific and personal experiences, the moments and habits that formed in response to the individual changes in everyone’s lives.
I started keeping track of some of these smaller stories. One of my brothers hauled out our childhood SNES to revisit Yoshi’s Island when the restaurant he worked for closed. Two friends who don’t usually play games spent a fortnight in hotel quarantine, taking turns at Stardew Valley. Another friend, classified as an essential worker, asked for recommendations of phone games she could use to distract herself from the stress of her commute, a bubble of directed attention whose protection would back up the physical protection of her mask. Two more started to hold their online meetings in Red Dead Redemption, pretend cowboys sitting around a shared fire to talk about their work.
I’ve put together New Rules to try to collect more of these moments and habits and stories: different experiences of how games have fit into people’s lives this year, and how play has emerged from their very particular contexts.
I’ve played more games than usual this year, I think, but they’re not the games I would have expected, and they’re definitely not the games I would have consciously chosen.
For a few weeks of interchangeable days I woke up most nights at around four and and played Justin Smith’s Golf On Mars on my phone, a game of infinite low-gravity golf where every hole is so similar to every other hole that a cloud or an oddly-shaped cactus comes as a miracle of novelty.
For two days non-stop I played Princess Maker 2, giving my princess different lives and adventures, sending her off to cities and into woods.
For a while every game, or at least every videogame, felt like a metaphor. It’s hard for them not to, when the same thing over and over is an echo of every weird day and going somewhere and having adventures is a vision of all the journeys that you can’t take. Most videogames fall into one category or the other, and plenty are both at once: I lost days that I still resent to distance incremental, a browser game about going on increasingly long journeys, each signified only by text and numbers. I clicked on things, my journey measured in metres then kilometres then light years then other larger measurements that I’d never even heard of. Each time I started the journey again, I went just a little bit faster.
I live in London but my husband Terry and I spent March to September this year in a white and empty AirBnB outside my hometown of Adelaide. We booked it from a still-open coffee shop when we called off a roadtrip to Melbourne halfway between our first and second overnight stays; initially the house was only available for ten days, but soon our flights back to the UK were cancelled and then everyone else’s AirBnB bookings were cancelled as well, one by one, so we kept extending our stay, first a week and then a month at a time.
We rarely saw the neighbours in our new suburb but our street, like many, quickly acquired beady button eyes that stared out of the corners of house windows, stuffed toys tucked on the glass side of the curtains to give local kids a spot-the-critter game to play as they went on their walks. We never saw a child walking but we did see hopscotch and big flowers messily chalked on a driveway, twice, so they must have been around somewhere.
Terry started playing Thief Simulator, and when I watched him it felt like the game of our new neighbourhood. He walked around empty (game) suburbs and broke into dozens of (game) houses which all had the same low hibiscus bushes and the same artwork reading LOVE hung up on the wall and the same single saucepan in a kitchen cupboard. Meanwhile the (real) houses on our street all had identical raggedly-topiaried white roses; the canvas photoprint on the wall above the sofa showed far-away London in black and white with a red phonebox in the centre; we cooked with a mix of plates and cutlery which did not include (for example) a cheese grater, wooden spoon, set of chopsticks, jug or spatula, but which did include fifteen rattan paper plate holders and a toast rack.
I bought Yahtzee, the only game I could get with a supermarket order, to make up for the board games we’d left in London. We never played it.
We did play A Short Hike, a game about exploring a mountain which felt like a real day out, a wonder. Then we played Lonely Mountains: Downhill, a game that felt like a real bike ride, by which I mean it was clearly very good but it stressed me out a lot and I didn’t really know how to do it and I was constantly terrified of falling off. I chatted on a voice-only zoom call with two friends, one in slow recovery from they-weren’t-quite-sure-what, while we explored, rearranged and eventually destroyed a copy of a Minecraft museum.
A couple of times Terry and I walked down to the sea and taunted it, which is that game where you stand just out of reach of the waves and tell the sea that you are invincible, that it is powerless against you, and you wait to see how quickly you turn out to be wrong and how wet you get.
I’m still playing more games than I usually would. I’ve been playing the virtual reality frantic-arm-waving rhythm game Beat Saber a lot, for example, because I can plausibly claim it as exercise in the context of my largely sedentary lockdown lifestyle (or in any case, my arms ache after I play and sometimes I smell bad).
And Terry is still playing Roblox most weeks with a couple of friends in other countries, trying out different user-created games from its vast and unwieldy catalogue. He emerges each time with actual stories, things he’s done that — unlike almost everything else he’s done this year — I wasn’t there for: he lost a makeover contest, he adopted cute animals and threw them in a river, he played hide and seek, he went scuba diving in a lake, he turned into a giant egg with legs.
We’re still in Adelaide but now we’re in a place that feels like a real house that people have actually lived in. We’ve been so lucky with the local response to the pandemic, and in doing the sort of work we can continue from another country, and in having a landlord who let us sublet our flat in London. I played Hades a couple of weeks ago and it just felt like playing a game, and barely at all like a metaphor about a perpetually looping and inescapable life in the dimly-lit underworld.
But of course the pandemic is still going on, with the very first vaccinations rolling out but cases still rising around the world. And games and play are still a part of how people are responding, often in very different ways now than in the earlier part of 2020.
New Rules is about the details and moments of individual people’s lives, and how dominos or Sudoku or Zelda or birds outside the window or quizzes or RPGs or online escape rooms or dozens of other types of play, good and bad and tense and relaxing and exploratory and resented and astonishing, have fit into this year.
If you’re reading this during the pandemic, I hope there’s something that’s interesting to find out about, or that you can feel a connection to, or that gives you a different angle on your own experience of games this year, or maybe even that makes you want to play something.
And if you’re reading this in the future, and the pandemic’s over, well: here are some of the ways we spent our strange time in 2020.
Holly Gramazio (website, twitter) is a curator, writer and game designer. She founded the games festival Now Play This, wrote the videogame Dicey Dungeons, and designed the card game Art Deck.
Image adapted from “Kaubamaja playground shut down“ by Mana Kaasik under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license, and released under the same license.
