Playing with Reality: Gaming in a Pandemic

Publishing as an industry is obsessed with new – books yet to come out… but what about the brilliant books that have already been published? Each month we spotlight a different author whose book was published more than a year ago, which you might be yet to meet… This month we hear from Alex Humphreys about the brilliant Playing with Reality: Gaming in a Pandemic…

Shuffling the Shelves: Playing with Reality: Gaming in a Pandemic by Alex Humphreys

I turned to video games in 2020 to help me forget about the outside, pandemic-ravaged world. As a journalist in a busy newsroom in Cardiff, we kept working throughout, but I suddenly found myself feeling guilty for having to self-isolate at home, with nothing to do but watch the news with the rest of the nation, far from my family who lived 200 miles away. Playing Zelda: Breath of the Wild was like therapy, and I realised immediately that there must have been others who were being helped by games. So I started looking into it online, reading other people’s stories. When I started to write about it, it was more as something I felt I had to do for myself, rather than for anyone else’s eyes. It wasn’t until a few months later that I thought it might be of interest to other people.

As I look back now, six years later, reading through my book is like stepping into a time capsule. It’s funny how quickly we forget what things were like back then, when we were all told to stay home to save lives. I remember walking to work every day in the middle of the main road in the hot sunshine, just because I could – there weren’t any cars around, of course. It was like being in some post-apocalyptic film or game, where everyone had just left.

I still find it interesting flicking through the stories of how other people coped through games – like Sharon Su, the concert pianist from California who found solace in Animal Crossing: New Horizons after being subjected to racial abuse. 'There was an additional layer of stress from existing as an Asian person during Covid… It took me a really long time to get comfortable leaving the house again. When I did, I’d wear a baseball cap, sunglasses and a mask so you couldn’t tell what I was.' And Barry McGuigan from Scotland, who lived in his conservatory through lockdown to protect his terminally-ill wife and two young boys, as he ventured out into the germ-ridden world to get supplies for his family. And the vicar who streamed himself playing video games, which became an unconventional place for people to talk. I wonder how they’re getting on now.

As for the gaming industry, it has since been plagued by thousands of job cuts over the past few years, with the ‘golden age of gaming’ during the pandemic being mainly to blame. As I wrote the book in the midst of it, reading how and why that over-investment happened in real-time is something that I think is rare to have captured.

It’s funny – because of the stressful time in which it was written, it took me a while to really appreciate what I’d done: written my first book! But I’m incredibly proud of it. In the words of one reviewer, Bernhard Drax, 'this book is a triumph of capturing a unique moment in time.' I really do hope you enjoy it.