In this week’s newsletter: in bleak moments, games can satisfy our urge to take action and make things better
Last modified on Tue 1 Mar 2022 07.48 EST
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It’s difficult to sit down and concentrate at the moment, isn’t it. Whenever something worrying and momentous is occurring in the news, most things feel frivolous and pointless. I used to experience an amorphous sense of guilt around writing about video games for a living when important and harrowing things were happening in the wider world. I work at a newspaper replete with talented people doing difficult and vital journalism about the geopolitical events that affect us all. Should we not be reading that, instead of something about Elden Ring?
It was the pandemic that finally convinced me that games, like all art and culture, are vital when things are terrible – they provide not just a distraction, but also respite. When we are overwhelmed, we need something that helps us feel more grounded, in control. When we are heartbroken, we seek out songs and novels and poems (and, yes, games) that reflect our feelings back at us, or give us space to process them. During 2020, video games were actively helping people – to socialise, to unwind, to cope with the near-unbearable stress of living through Significant Historic Events. I saw (and reported on) the positive effects that they were having on people, some of whom were totally new to games. Sometimes it can be difficult to find the joy in the real world. That is why we create fictional ones.
I think that in times of crisis, games are not just a useful escape from our feelings, but a way to process them. I was really struck by these lines from the closing paragraph of Simon Parkin’s beautiful Elden Ring review last week: “Video games can be all kinds of different things, representing all manner of artistic ambitions. Most, however, share a common goal: to conjure a compelling fictional reality, filled with beckoning mysteries, enchanting secrets, and enriching opportunities to compete and collaborate. They aim to provide a liminal space in which a determined player can fix that which is broken, order that which is chaotic … Its final gift is the assurance that, whatever monsters lurk in a broken world, with perseverance and cooperation, they too can be overcome.”
That urge to fix things – to take action, to make things better – is something that video games can satisfy for us, even when there is little we can usefully do to help in the real world. This is why, perhaps, they can be such a powerful mental salve, and why we so often turn to them when things feel broken. Here, at least – on my Animal Crossing island, or in the Lands Between, or on my Civ map, I can experience a sense of calm, of joy, of victory, and bring some order to the world.
I have never seen a more affecting interactive portrayal of the effects of conflict on ordinary people than This War of Mine, from Polish studio 11 Bit, inspired by the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s. Instead of a squad of soldiers, you take control of ordinary people searching for food, shelter, medicine and safety in an occupied country, trying to avoid danger and get by until a ceasefire is declared. You must manage not only their physical needs, but also their emotional state, which takes a dreadful battering with each new misfortune. It doesn’t soften the horrors of war; it doesn’t offer you an easy way to win. But this is an example of how video games can be unmatched in their ability to engender empathy. For the next few days, the developer is donating all profits to the Ukrainian Red Cross.
Available on: Xbox, PlayStation 4/5, PC, Nintendo Switch, smartphones
Approximate playtime: 10 hours
The video game industry has of course responded to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which is home to several game studios. Frogwares, makers of the Sherlock games, have been posting updates on Twitter: “the team is now spread throughout Ukraine. Pinned under bombs, with tanks and mechanised artillery by their windows.” GSC, currently making Stalker 2: Heart of Chernobyl, entreated the rest of the world not to stand aside. Ubisoft has paid for all of its employees in the region to relocate to wherever they consider safe. Developers Bungie, CD Projekt RED and others have pledged to donate to humanitarian aid as the crisis continues.
In wider games news: Street Fighter 6 has been announced, with a troublingly sterile logo that rather goes against the ostentatious arcade riotousness of the franchise. Nintendo has also announced the next two Pokémon games, Scarlet and Violet, with a teaser trailer promising an open-world adventure.
The Steam Deck, a portable gaming PC from gaming kingmakers Valve, has been made available to a very small number of people while the company ramps up production. Not everything runs on it, but impressions so far suggest that this is as good and powerful a portable gaming machine as we’ve ever seen.
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Reader SleepingDog is here with a question that’s niche in a way I can totally get behind: What games (best) treat Scottish independence (in a near-future sense)?
The game that immediately came to mind was Watch Dogs: Legion, an innovative and lovably imperfect action-thriller about a near-future London that has become a technocratic surveillance state. In this game’s fiction, Brexit was a disaster, Scotland seceded from the UK, and corporate and military interests have seized total control over government, providing two very good illustrations of why Scottish independence might be a good idea in the first place. Unfortunately there is barely a mention of Scotland in the game’s actual script (to my knowledge, and I played a lot of it), so we don’t know how it’s going north of the border in this fictional future. If you want a go at running an independent Scotland yourself, you could always try Civilization 6.
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