The Pandemic Papers: How Slowing Down Improved My Gaming Experience
This has been a long year, and as we head into the holidays it seems as good a time as any to share some resources; the games and stories that offered a light in the darkness, a simple escape, or a moment of meaning. We hope that if you are reading this and find yourself in need of a lift, then you might find inspiration in The Pandemic Papers.
You might not have heard, but CD Projekt Red released a game this year. The hype for Cyberpunk 2077 was huge even before we were all confined to our living rooms for months on end, a game that promised so much. As the Green Goblin says in Raimi’s first Spider-Man, the only thing people love more than a hero is to watch a hero fail. So it has been in our vicious news cycle, the sadly familiar toxicity of passionate fans turning their energy towards tearing down a project that people worked away on for the better part of a decade. Now I’m not here to claim that all this ire is unwarranted, Cyberpunk 2077’s release was well and truly bungled by a company that was trying to please all people – a fool’s errand. What I want to do instead, is talk about why there was so much hype in the first place, that super power that made CD Projekt such a hero, their world-class attention to detail, and how it made me love slow-gaming.