I know you've read this headline already. I think this article has been required writing for every gaming journalist stuck at home trying to connect with their readers. It doesn't bother me that you've seen this before because 2020 is the year where, whether we all want to believe it or not, we've all shared maybe the most prolong single shared experience of most of our lives. Gaming is not what got me through this, but I appreciate it now more than I ever did before.
2020 started out with a broken foot and ended with a broken sternum and two ribs for me. If I were, to sum up, the year as mildly as possible, the phrase "Fuck 2020" is the sweetest sentiment I can muster. Just as my foot started to heal, the grocery stores began to run out of toilet paper, WHO warnings became dire, and the President of the United States of America assured me everything was fine. I knew things were about to go from bad to worse. My wife is a nurse on the cardiac and pulmonary floor at a relatively large hospital; they started to cancel surgeries as they waited for the possible onslaught of sick patients. Then they shut my office down and sent us home to work. I called Brad and told him I thought things were going to get really bad. We hung up and started a run-through of Division 2.
Division 2, if you haven't played it, is set in a post-apocalyptic America ravaged by a weaponized version of the flu, spread on Black Friday by infected money. If you are anxious about an oncoming pandemic, this is the game to play. Division 2 was released the year before the pandemic, and it got a few things right. Audio logs in the game mention people hoarding toilet paper, and New York was the first and hardest hit. What it mostly got wrong was people heading into the streets, forming gangs that either set people on fire or executed them for side glances. Instead of being activated as elite agents sent to save the world from itself, Brad and I sat on the couch, him smoking copious amounts of weed and me eating ungodly amounts of pop tarts I bought for my family for when the food ran out. The gameplay was solid, the world was lively, and the story was better than expected, but what Division really did was offer Brad and I a way to hang out when the world had just started getting weird.
Brad and I didn't choose Division out of some planned meta experience of art imitating life or the other way around if you have a liberal arts degree; it was just a game we had laying around we hadn't beat. That said, escaping reality by heading off to a much worse reality at first seemed like a solid way to go about it. Brad and I would joke that while we couldn't go to the movies at least the streets weren't overun by overly dramatic supervillians. At one point we did realize our avatars could find N95 mask lying in boxes ont he street by my wife didn't have any at work.
One night my wife came home, stripped naked in the garage so to not expose the family, and explained to me that she had to hold up an ipad as a patient died so his family could say goodbye. Nurses around the US were staying in patients rooms to make sure they didn't die alone and I was glad the Division only showed the lighter side of a pandemic.
Division 2:
Pandemic rating 8/10
Long gameplay, mindless, a plot that works like a soap opera. This game is the Fox primetime version of a bad thriller series.