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Gaming the Pandemic

One week into 2021, Epic Games had already made the headlines twice. On 3 January, the developer of the megahit game Fortnite, based in Cary, North Carolina, announced it was moving its headquarters across town to the Cary Towne Center, a 980,000-square-foot mall opened in 1979 and now mostly empty (Wagner and Eanes). Four days later, the company acquired RAD, a maker of game tools whose products are featured in every game being made today (Coldewey). The repurposing of the defunct mall was a widely applauded vote of confidence in the town of Cary. It was a sign that, even with the pandemic, all was well in the Research Triangle—the National Humanities Center; the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; and Duke University. Epic Games is the purveyor of a fantasy world remarkably attuned to the pulses of the moment. Its resources are superabundant, but its ability to intervene in real time is the rule rather than the exception. The gaming industry is one of the few economic sectors to continue to flourish under COVID-19 (Smith). The industry often closely tracks current events, sometimes at considerable risk to itself. In April 2020, Animal Crossing, an open-ended game developed by Nintendo that allows players to live among animals and write their own scripts, was banned by China, apparently for lending support to the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong (Davidson). Ian Bogost argues in The Atlantic that this social simulation series is political, not escapist. Can this be said of games in general? That question would come up again after the violence on the United States Capitol in January 2021, when commentators were struck by the “eerie parallels” between the riots and another game franchise, Tom Clancy’s The Division (Kerridge). “There can’t be many people who failed to find themselves transfixed by Wednesday’s footage,” Jake Kerridge writes in the Telegraph. “And yet there is one demographic who may have watched the mayhem unfold with a slightly blasé sense of having seen it all before: gamers.” The Division is set in a divided America, brought low by a global pandemic and domestic terrorism. The first installment of the game, released in 2016, features medics in personal protective equipment struggling to stay afloat in an overwhelmed hospital, with the tagline, “They said it was just the flu, but it turned out to be