Inner Sloth
You can cobble together a narrative of responses to the horrors of 2020 from the games that shot to fame at different times. Early on, we looked for games that helped us understand the COVID-19 crisis – Ndemic’s virus sim Plague Inc topped iOS charts in February, eight years after release. Then, as the lockdowns kicked in, we sought out games that offered refuge. For a while, the socially distant game of choice was Animal Crossing: New Horizons. We became more reliant on games as social spaces, and especially those that hinted at physical contact – see Fall Guys, in which players jostle together like kids in a ball pit.