No, I don’t have any illusions about what I’ve change into for the reason that begin of this yr. Like so many different barely uncomfortable issues in my life, this occupation began as an ill-defined joke. Wouldn’t or not it’s humorous, I assumed to myself, if I purchased a video games console for the primary time in a decade. If nothing else, wouldn’t it simply be a small, deserved protest in opposition to the stresses of maturity?

Once I tried to elucidate this choice to my family members, it was greeted with tolerant concern. Within the nothing days between Christmas and new yr my associate requested if this was a distraction I actually wanted in a busy life. “Simply wait a bit,” she stated, as if talking to a barely unruly little one, “till you’re actually certain it’s what you need.” And in what felt like seconds later, there I used to be, in a Peckham pc change store, queuing furtively for a secondhand Xbox One with a few reliably blockbuster video games to go along with it.

The primary weeks have been a mix of ironic detachment and oppressive nostalgia. It felt acceptable to restrict myself to some hours of Fifa or GTA 5 every week, with their veneer of mainstream conformity. This was a behavior that would simply be checked and stored underneath strict management. The world was nonetheless what it was – we had social lives, went to work on packed public transport; the nice outdoor was nonetheless accessible past our entrance doorways. Again then, the thought of admitting that I’d change into a part-time gamer was one thing shameful sufficient to be hid from all however my closest buddies.

It took the world being placed on maintain for the stance of myself and others to melt. Now, my aimless nighttime drives by way of the gorgeous chaos of Los Santos has gathered an undeserved dignity. They’re now not signs of an undiagnosed regression into adolescence, however a type of escapism to be envied. In mid-March, a good friend I’d confided in about my preliminary buy was tapping me for recommendation. How a lot, the place from, what video games to purchase? He and I actually weren’t alone in these early days of panic: recreation gross sales skilled a world surge as folks internationally sheltered at dwelling. Within the UK, digital downloads rose by 67% week-on-week throughout March, whereas through the window of social distancing earlier than the strict lockdown was enforced bodily gross sales jumped by 218%.

No recreation higher represents the convergence of adolescence and escapism than Animal Crossing. The newest version of Nintendo’s wildly standard social simulator has change into the definitive recreation of lockdown, its light utopianism making it an ideal match for “the coronavirus moment”. It’s a deceptively easy affair, a soft-edged, primary-coloured universe, the place the participant builds a society on their very own personalised island paradise. There isn’t any violence or human nastiness, and definitely no risk of a creeping pandemic. The sport even follows real-world time, its gradual but dynamic little universe giving gamers a way of management that’s absent from our present actuality.

On the final afternoon earlier than the lockdown started in power, I returned to the pc change store. The road was noticeably longer, the group extra various in its combination of callow part-timers and hardened fanatics. I reached for the most important recreation I’d heard of. If any recreation have been to obliterate the empty hours to come back, or transport me far past suburban south London, it will be Red Dead Redemption 2 – the “mature” epic set through the terminal decline of the outdated wild west. The dissonance between my lounge and the huge expanse on display would have been odd sufficient in one of the best of instances, not to mention through the confinement of the current. Now, the sport’s inner universe, with its hyperrealistic pure landscapes and stylish vistas, is soothing in its certainties, an efficient distraction from the world exterior.

Like most issues, I suppose this response to the current has roots within the deep previous of my very own life. As with so many kids of my technology, I used to be enamoured with pc video games. There was actually no embarrassment about this fixation in my tight-knit friendship circle. When my mom died just a few months after my seventh birthday, video games have been an escape from this new actuality. Weekends have been spent at buddies’ homes, taking part in Nintendo 64 till our eyes glazed over and we dropped into an exhausted sleep. A few years later, in 2002, I used to be given a Gamecube by my grandmother and aunt, who I lived with as my authorized guardians. This console, the primary that I’d owned, felt just like the realisation of my wildest goals. There wasn’t an excessive amount of cash round in our lives, and I felt a surge of delight that it will be my flip to play host to my buddies in our basement flat, staying up all evening in entrance of no matter cheerfully demented multiplayer recreation we might get our arms on.

In fact, a very immersive escape has at all times been unattainable, and maybe unhealthy. It’s one factor taking short-term refuge from a painful actuality, fairly one other to disregard it fully. I’m underneath no illusions concerning the limits of my partially rediscovered enthusiasm for pc video games and what it says about life on this present local weather. In actual phrases, they nonetheless type a really minor use of my time. Much more is taken up with different equally ineffective pursuits, although I don’t say that with a sneer. My life is happiest when it has sufficient gloriously pointless distractions to easy down its extra strenuous components. Of all of the issues to really feel responsible about, just a few snatched hours on digital horseback in Red Dead Redemption 2 doesn’t really feel like one of the urgent proper now.

Escapism isn’t a unclean phrase, so long as its limits are recognised. To dwell decently by way of the current, we’d like extra than simply work and the grim cycle of each day information. It doesn’t actually matter whether or not it’s the gentleness of Animal Crossing or the widescreen bombast of one in all Rockstar’s open worlds, the overall tendency is identical. There’s a purpose so many are discovering refuge in video video games: they promise a world much less unsure than our personal.

• Francisco Garcia is a London-based author and journalist