Playing through a pandemic

Playing through a pandemic

Online video gaming and screen-based technology are helping us get through COVID-19, write digital media experts Larissa Hjorth and Ingrid Richardson.

It’s been a difficult year so far.

From the unprecedented bushfires a few months ago and now the COVID-19 pandemic, which has forced us into physical distancing and self-isolation, it is a somber time of deep reflection, grief, and recalibration.

Yet it is also a time of reaching out to others through mobile and online networks.

Interestingly, though not surprisingly, over the past weeks we have witnessed a surge in screen-based activities and social media engagement.

In America, according to one telecommunications company, overall videogame internet traffic has increased by 75% since COVID-19 restrictions were imposed. 

The case is likely to be similar in Australia, as we are a country of avid gamers - 67% of us play games, compared to 65% in the United States.

For many us, working and studying from home ­­is altering the daily rhythms of life.

Grandparents and their grandchildren are using FaceTime to talk and play.

Workmates are reclaiming Zoom as a recreational medium to keep the ritual of Friday night drinks alive.

Friends are playing lots of games together more often - from casual puzzle games like Words With Friends, to deeply immersive online worlds like Subnautica, Final Fantasy XIV and Overwatch.

Though multiplayer games may at times be fraught with prejudice and bullying antics, they can also be vibrant spaces where people engage in a lively spectrum of social interaction, forming long-lasting friendships and communities.

Playing and talking together through games - while physically apart - can foster deep connections across generations and cultures.

As the heightened threat of viral contagion grips the popular imagination, the debates around screen time, and especially games, have shifted.

Even the World Health Organisation (WHO), which last year officially registered game addiction as a mental health disorder, has now recognised the communicative power and global reach of games.

WHO’s global strategy ambassador Ray Chambers recently tweeted his support of #PlayApartTogether, an initiative of game industry leaders including Twitch, Riot Games and Amazon Appstore.

Members of the program are disseminating key messages throughout their vast network of users, encouraging everyone to follow the WHO coronavirus guidelines. 

Gamers pass these messages on, reminding each other to wash their hands and stay safe, and offering support to physically isolated players in quarantine.

The phenomenon highlights a well-versed argument in media and game studies: that we need more nuanced ways to understand the role of games in our everyday lives, beyond dystopian versus utopian polemics.

As international media scholars have identified, for children and adults alike, videogames have ongoing positive effects on wellbeing.

They are spaces of collaborative effort and creativity, of real social connection and inclusion.

Games that welcome younger players like Minecraft and Roblox - each with more than 100 million monthly active users amassing over one billion hours of playtime - not only facilitate sociality but also function as familiar and importantly normal spaces for children and young people to talk about, or escape from, the current crisis.

For many children, currently unable to play physically with their friends, games are a way of staying connected and being playful, both necessary ingredients of youthful wellbeing.

Games can also turn the mundane space of the home into a virtual playground.

Pokemon GO - a popular augmented reality game that requires players to walk about and tag locations in their neighbourhoods and city streets - has temporarily changed the mechanics so that the play can take place within the proximity of one’s house.

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Especially now, games are important not only as spaces for friendly sociality and play, but also because they allow us to explore, take risks, empathise, and build a sense of community, caring and belonging that directly responds to the current crisis.

During the COVID-19 emergency, people are not only playing more games for longer, but the content and messaging has shifted.

For example, in the “digital LEGO” game of Minecraft, a community of players has recreated the hospitals built in Wuhan following the COVID-19 outbreak - as a “tribute to the builders and hospital workers on the front line”.

Play theorists have long argued that our capacity to play defines us as social and empathic beings.

As one form of collective play, online videogames have become enduring cultural interfaces and social domains, with all the complexity and possibility that implies.

For media and cultural researchers, exploring gamespaces and gameplay during times of significant change and upheaval can offer us crucial insights into how we recalibrate our lives, and the consequential shifts in our collective zeitgeist.

Though we might still be in the early stages, as our social lives becomes increasingly and necessarily digital, some game environments and their players are showing promising signs of empathy, hope and collective resilience.

Distinguished Professor Larissa Hjorth is an artist, digital ethnographer and Director of RMIT's Design and Creative Practice ECP.

Ingrid Richardson is a Professor of Digital Media in RMIT's School of Media and Communication.

16 April 2020

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16 April 2020

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