I really did think I’d be able to keep up with regular blog posts.
The first week that the enormity and urgency of COVID-19 in America became undeniable, it didn’t seem appropriate to riff on some old comic book I had read, or talk about something I was working on in vague terms—even on a personal-outlet blog with a readership likely in the low single digits. The popular comic newsletters, the templates we’re all aping, handled it awkwardly in March and April, calling COVID-19 “That Thing” or “the thing we’re not talking about here,” inadvertently drawing extra attention to a thing they most certainly were talking about there.
That’s not to mock the effort, though; we are living through one of the only truly global experiences of many of our lifetimes, and it has an indefinite timeline and devastating consequences. The vast majority of us have nothing meaningful or helpful to add to the conversation, which is why most of what you’ll find on Twitter is either open panic or dubiously well-intentioned scolding, as people conditioned to a “micro-blogging” platform try to figure out what is expected of them during a pandemic. (The answer, insofar as public social-media statements, is nothing, unless the person in question is an elected official or public-facing health expert.)
As the weeks passed and it became clearer and clearer that we are in for a long-haul fight against both the virus and widespread misinformation and a seemingly overactive death drive among significant portions of the population, keeping up a blog that mainly exists to lure me away from social-media posting felt small and rude. My family also has an ongoing, non-COVID medical situation, and, against all odds, work has been picking up for me during all of this, adding additional excuses not to collect my thoughts each week.
Now that there’s a hefty, conspicuous gap between dates on my blog roll, though, I find myself missing the pattern of it. I think that’s something a lot of us are discovering as we adapt to working from home or funemployment (or, in the case of freelancers like myself, working from home as usual, except with a trillion new distractions): the familiarity and comfort of patterns and schedules. Prior to New York’s shutdown, I set my otherwise freewheeling work schedule by my boyfriend’s departure to and return from the office every day, which helped motivate me to run errands, exercise, and put a good dent in my writing while I had the apartment to myself. Now, I’m grateful for the extra time we’re spending together, but it’s harder to get out of bed when he’s still adorably snoring away next to me, or to pull myself away from a TV binge and hide in a quiet corner of the house to get some writing done.
I had also developed, for the first time in way too long, a regular exercise schedule, visiting multiple area gyms via ClassPass and running on off days. And since I cook for two and we share a kitchen with our roommate and his boyfriend, I enjoyed daily grocery-store runs to pick up stuff on a whim, rather than the more suburban method of weekly big-haul shopping. I was such a familiar face at Starbucks that several of the friendliest baristas follow me on Instagram.
Now, I can’t imagine setting foot inside a gym again in 2020, grocery-store trips are planned and executed like military maneuvers, and our local Starbucks is among the last scheduled to reopen (although, happily, the staff is working at other locations in the interim). I have been unbelievably lucky and grateful to have only superficial disruptions to my life during this pandemic, but the superficial disruptions are still disruptions, and I hit a low point a few weeks ago where days all blurred together and almost anything I did felt like a waste of time that could have been better spent in other ways.
That’s not an anxiety that’s exclusive to the COVID era, though; other have written more insightfully than I can here about the pressures of our always-on, always-available world, and the work culture that has sprung up around it. Compound that with the realities of freelancing, in which you must always be hustling for the gig after your next gig before you finish the gig right in front of you, and just watching the “wrong” movie or TV show can feel like a guilty decision. Is my morbid curiosity at the Olivia Munn Predator movie worth two hours of my life I could have spent watching something on the Criterion Channel, or reading a Great NovelTM from my bookshelf? Is this superhero comic I know will be mediocre comfort food a defensible use of 10 minutes, or should I be reading something outside my comfort zone to broaden my horizons?
I wish I could say that those questions led to productive answers more often than not, but my boyfriend could point to dozens of nights when I had possession of the remote control, relative carte blanche from him, and still remained frozen when it came to committing to a cinematic decision. But something finally snapped during the lockdown, as time ceased to follow a coherent flow and days blended into nights: Animal Crossing.
No, I haven’t personally picked up Nintendo’s adorable animal life-simulator, which launched with perhaps the most accidentally fortuitous timing of all time. But my boyfriend has, logging a truly staggering number of hours and diving off the AC shadow-economy deep end. Tom Nook’s machinations have lured him away from Apex Legends, Fortnite, and Dead by Daylight on the PS4 and held his attention on the handheld Switch, freeing up Sony’s hardware for me to finally, after great delay, commit to a few of the PS4 selections that have been stacking up on our media console for the last few years.
As my friends are wont to mock, it takes me a very long time to play video games. Up until college, I considered myself a relatively active gamer, but I found it increasingly hard over the years to balance my various media interests, eventually committing almost all of my free time to comics, prose, and horror movies. For a solid two years, the only game I really played was Overwatch, as I could convince myself that an hour here or there was a good brain-off outlet and not a waste of time. But certain titles on my video-game shelf kept staring at me, whispering that they were a valid use of my time and attention.
With my boyfriend terraforming his island and negotiating NookMiles trades on the couch next to me, I slotted in God of War, picking up from an old save file that had barely left the opening area…and I was hooked. There’s very little I can say about this 2018 hit that hasn’t already been shouted from the gaming rooftops, but rarely has any piece of media held up to the hype the way that God of War did, keeping me engaged with flawlessly smooth game play and the most immersive storytelling I’ve ever experienced in gaming. Even the games we think of as narrative-first, like the BioShock series, usually involve a lot of repeated filler dialogue, and pauses in the action to progress the story between sections of running and/or gunning. Not so God of War, which almost never takes Kratos out of your control, and delivers hours of dialogue during game play thanks to companion conservations that feel natural and loaded with foreshadowing. I guess the two big narrative “twists” in God of War, but in a way that felt rewarding rather than cheap.
More than anything, though, God of War was frickin’ fun. As my friend Jakob Free is fond of saying, the GoW developers basically made the best possible Thor game that isn’t licensed by Disney. The simple mechanics of throwing an ax that returns to you opens up some of the best combat and puzzles in any game of this type. After years of fretting over whether or not a video game was a good use of my 20-30 hours, God of War was the perfect reintroduction to the pleasures of sitting on the couch, controller in hand, exploring a fictional world that requires your active participation to reveal itself (even if a solid hour of that was just replaying the Valkyrie Queen fight over and over).
It’s unfortunate for the next game I played, then, that God of War was so perfect. I am an open and honest Star Wars apologist. I have a predisposition to enjoying almost anything with lightsabers and Twi’leks in it, unless it is actively, offensively bad (guess which installment of the Sequel Trilogy fits that description for me!!!). Jedi: Fallen Order was a no-brainer, then, even if its overtures at Dark Souls-like elements would otherwise be a deterrent. It’s hard to say if I would have liked Fallen Order more without Kratos’ shadow looming over it. Fallen Order is far from a bad game, but it lacked GoW’s polish, crashing on me four times and hosting enough bugs to distract from the otherwise sheer coolness of tossing Stormtroopers around with the Force. Some of the game’s flaws are inherent, though: it requires Metroid-esque backtracking but its rewards are strictly underwhelming cosmetics (another poncho color…cool); Force powers—and even flashy lightsaber moves—deplete a modest power reserve, meaning you can never feel too powerful; its least interesting character is the protagonist; the most common enemies are local fauna that don’t “feel” very Star Wars, and what’s a Jedi doing slaughtering goats anyway?
I certainly didn’t hate Jedi: Fallen Order, but it felt like a game that was unsure about itself, held together by a story that is sometimes engaging but largely predetermined. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that Jedi Padawan Kal Cestis does not reignite the Jedi Order years before Luke Skywalker picks up his lightsaber for the first time. If Rogue One pulls off an admirable trick by convincing you it might not end the way you think it’s going to end, Fallen Order pretty much just asks you to pretend you don’t know what's coming when you boot it up.
Thankfully, though, I didn’t end my reenergized gaming binge with the crew of the Mantis. After leaving Dathomir behind, I suited up for Spider-Man, which is stunningly derivative of the Arkham games…and probably one of my favorite things I’ve ever played? To pretend that developer Insomniac doesn’t owe a big thank-you to Rocksteady for cracking the code on superhero gaming is just willful ignorance, but where the Arkham games barely walk the line of grimdark parody at times, Spider-Man felt like a wide-grinning love letter to the Friendly Neighborhood side of protecting a major metropolitan city. The combat and web-swinging is fluid and fun, the story is pure Spidey (thanks in no small part, I’m sure, to the involvement of experienced comics writers Christos Gage and Dan Slott), and the game does a satisfying job of balancing familiar arachnid expectations with just enough new twists to keep things engaging.
Those twists are part of what these three games share when it came to impressive story decisions: the ability to make seemingly secondary antagonists into worthwhile story-carrying foes. God of War eschews the most over-exposed faces in the Norse pantheon (saved, I’m sure, for sequels), Fallen Order hinges on the pursuit of Inquisitors, and Spider-Man eventually gets around to the big guns, but not before giving major profile boosts to Mr. Negative and Silver Sable, among others. It’s smart franchise planning, sure, but it’s also plain good character work, and an investment against the future. Martin Li was not a household name before Spider-Man on the PS4 (and he isn’t exactly one now), but now everyone familiar with that game has one more Spidey foe they can name from memory, which means one more Spidey foe Marvel and/or Sony can look at as a bigger opportunity.
Manhattan in over two months now, the longest I’ve been away from the symbolic middle of NYC in over a decade. There’s nothing in Manhattan that I can’t get here in Astoria, or at least that seems worth the risk of subways and larger crowds. But in Spidey’s Manhattan, I can swing across an impressively reconstructed city without getting sweaty or infected. I can remember all my favorite parks and landmarks and just the general vibe of the city that attracted me to it way back in 2008. It’s not a perfect recreation—it’s obviously shrunk for the game, with some legally protected buildings fudged and other things moved around—but it’s one of the best I’ve ever seen in a game, and unlike the Gotham of the Arkham games, it’s full of people moving around, without face masks or six-feet distances (although the plot does eventually get eerily close to the present-day calamity). I knew I’d probably enjoy an Arkham-esque Spidey game co-written by Amazing Spider-Man scribes I already like, but I didn’t anticipate just how reassuring it would end up feeling.
My boyfriend is back on (as in, he is literally playing as I type this) Apex Legends, thanks to a new roster addition. I may not continue my PS4 momentum into Last of Us or Arkham Knight, the next overdue plays on my list. But if these three games are the extent of my pandemic play-throughs, they served as satisfying reminders that there are worthwhile lessons to take away from all sorts of media—at least more worthwhile than the “lessons” I learn from noncommittal and wasting a night in indecisiveness. I may have had to actively force myself not to feel guilty while I was chasing down Odin’s Ravens, timing Force-assisted jump puzzles, and upgrading my web abilities, but that guilt eventually abated, and I enjoyed myself. I had fun.
There are worse ways to spend quarantine.