As I write these lines we are entering our eighth month of quarantine in Buenos Aires, Argentina. There are four of us—my husband and me, our five-year-old Gael, and our one-year-old Vera. And it feels like we have been in lockdown forever.
My husband and I have worked in the video game and new media art fields for years now, so you might think that we have it all under control when it comes to entertaining our children. Guess again.
Gael and Vera have taught us to get beyond creative. Everything has been turned into a game. Everything. And every game has found new rules. Our house has truly become a 24-hour playground.
We are now used to walking through Lego bricks in the middle of the night, trying to avoid the corners and edges, and occasionally failing. We are no longer surprised at finding a Hot Wheels car in every possible corner of the house: in jacket pockets, in the grocery bag, inside the kitchen shelves and in between the blankets late at night when getting into bed. Though we still get startled from time to time by Vera’s mural paintings that appear in a matter of seconds inside the house; her favourite spot seems to be her brother’s bedroom but her masterpiece was, without a doubt, a red abstract landscape that covered the whole living room floor.
That particular area of the house has turned into a circus, a restaurant, a camp, a circus again, and now into a giant car-racing track with train tracks crossing and overlapping. Forget about playing The Last Of Us Part II, binge-watching that Netflix series or finishing a book. Instead we have watched every Lego movie and played every Lego videogame. My Animal Croossing: New Horizons island has been fully designed by my five-year-old and I’m now on the verge of becoming an expert on Sneaky Sasquatch from Apple Arcade.
We played Ticket to Ride (the board game) every single night in a row for a whole month until the board wore out, unfolding itself, meaning we had to stick it with tape. We invented new rules and designed alternative routes in order to make it more difficult: for example, when there were two possible routes, one was automatically blocked; or we played a speedrun trying to complete every single short path the game had to offer.
As the months went on it became clear that lockdown was going to last for a while, and we rescued my old games and toys from my parents’ house, discovering hidden treasures (thanks mom for keeping it all!). It brought back a lot of memories from my childhood and felt really special seeing my kids play with them. I must confess I might have been a bit more thrilled than them when we found the Troll doll’s box, but my old My Little Ponies were a big hit, even though they were a bit worse-for-wear after 25 years (!) in a box. We invented a special hairdresser treatment to recover them by submerging the ponies in a bubble bath and applying three different conditioner layers to each of them; we then carefully dried and combed or braided their hair. Most of them turned out looking brand new; others weren’t so lucky but at least enjoyed a great spa treatment!
As we played with my own old toys, we shot short films with the cellphone, which we sent to family and friends, and I remembered the times that I used to play with these same toys and shoot films with my dad and the film camera. My parents still have the film somewhere, and they had it converted into a video DVD, but I no longer have a DVD player with which to watch it. I wonder how long these new digital memories will last.
While we’ve been together non-stop, 24/7, Vera and Gael have become best partners in crime. Vera loves to copycat everything her older brother does, so we set aside a set of old cards to include her in the games. That way when we played Sushi Go! she would join us, showing her cards proudly, though we couldn’t help getting our own cards occasionally stolen. We even found her an old gamepad with no batteries in it. Now, whenever we turn on the TV or the computer she runs to the drawer to grab her red control and stands in front of the screen, pressing buttons happily, babbling in her own toddler language and fully convinced that she is also playing.
Of course lockdown hasn’t been a bed of roses. We’ve had our share of sobs. Even during times of play and games, there’s been rage over what have been declared “unfair” game matches. And I’ve had to unlock a new level of efficiency and sneakiness in order to get my work done, or even to try to find time to try a new game myself (I must confess I still haven’t been able to finish any of them).
But playing together has been a joy among the strangeness. And when we look back, we hope it will be the thing that we remember.
Lu Oulton (website, twitter) is a videogames’ curator and Cultural Producer specialized in New Media Art. She is the director of the Artgames exhibit “Game on! El arte en juego”, the co-editor of Cuadernos de Game Studies at Palermo University and co-founder of GAIA (Game Arts International Assembly). She is part of Women in Games Argentina Collective. She lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Image based on “Blanket Fort” by kayepants, under a CC BY-NC-SA license, and released under the same license.