2020 has been the year of the pandemic as COVID-19 rages across the globe, upending our lives and typical ways of doing things. It’s put the economy on the edge of a knife, disrupting livelihoods even as it kills hundreds of thousands of people around the world. City and state governments are at a loss for what to do, stuck between enacting stay-at-home orders to protect their citizens and loosening restrictions to ease the burden on the economy and furloughed workers. For many of us watching everything happening, we can feel helpless to do anything, but even as restrictions begin to ease, there is something you personally can still do to be a hero.
Stay home. Play games.
That’s right. Yes, economies may be reopening, but there is still a very present danger on our doorsteps, and for some of us, inside our own homes. Every time we go out, we provide another node for the virus, another piece in the network transmission from person to person. What if I told you that you were the chosen one, like so many stories? All you have to do to be a hero is sit down on your couch and play a game. Order food from an app. Limit leaving your home and interacting with other people to give coronavirus one less node of transmission.
And if you do have to go out for anything, take the proper safety precautions for yourself and others around you. Wear a mask. Stay socially distant, at least six feet away from other people. Limit what you touch, especially surfaces that tend to get a lot of traffic from a lot of people’s hands. And when you’re done doing whatever it is you needed to do, head back home, kick back on the couch, and fire up whatever you are in the mood to play.
Call of Duty: Warzone just got a new update, with just two weeks left in its third season. Overwatch’s Anniversary 2020 event starts today. Destiny 2 only has three weeks left to go in Season of the Worthy, so don’t forget to grind out whatever you are missing there. (Those three are on heavy rotation in my house right now.) And then there’s that enormous backlog of games you’ve never finished, and a hefty pile you’ve never even started. Now’s the perfect time to sink some time into something you missed from a few years back or clean up the platinum for that game you were so close on.
In fact, publishers and developers have been handing out free games to encourage you to stay home, so if somehow you’re a gamer with a clear backlog (or are just really indecisive when it comes to picking what to play), the most recent offer is the LEGO NINJAGO Movie Video Game completely free until May 21.
The fact is, there are essential workers right now who don’t have a choice. They have to be out there on the front lines, risking their own health and that of the people around them. Perhaps you are one of those workers, and for that, we thank you for what you are doing to provide essential services that keep everything running, whether its doctors and nurses in the hospitals fighting the virus or the delivery drivers bringing necessities (and entertainment) right to our front doors. So if you do have a choice, show your appreciation to them by doing what you’ve wished you could do all along. Just stay home and play games.
Join Evolve Media’s #WeSayThanks campaign to show support to essential workers and thank them for their selfless acts of kindness and heroism. To learn how to get involved, please visit https://www.
