It’s hardly a radical or surprising observation that the last few years have been a bit challenging all round. I mean, I’ve really had it easy on nearly every level and still found the whole period pretty fucking difficult to deal with. I can barely imagine what others without my privilege and resources have been through.
I can’t pretend to have responded to those challenges with grit and fortitude. There’s been a lot of retreating into the known and comforting. An awful lot of 2020 was spent playing Animal Crossing New Horizons, an almost aggressively anodyne and undemanding “retirement simulator” whose suspicious timeliness must surely have spawned all manner of lurid conspiracy theories blaming Nintendo for the pandemic. Even though I’d never played an AC game before, NH managed to feel like putting on an old sweater, a slightly queasy escape from our ghastly reality into some kind of undemanding and idealised alternative. Of course, this is one of the things that games and media and art are for — escapism has kind of a bad name, but that’s a lot of puritanical bullshit. Escape is a noble pursuit.
My consumption of new games, new media, new art seems to have taken a bit of a hit as part of this retreat. Not to nothing — and sometimes novelty makes the leap directly to comforting familiarity without passing Go or collecting £200 — but it certainly feels like the proportion of rereading and rewatching and replaying has massively increased.
I’m on my fifth or sixth playthrough of Breath of the Wild, and that’s not counting my many hours of tooled-up meandering through Hyrule after defeating Ganon for the first time. I revisited all of Guy Gavriel Kay’s novels — and recently knocked off Children of Earth and Sky yet again to follow up new release All the Seas of the World, with a revisit of A Brightness Long Ago queued up next. When faced with the option of tackling something new and unknown versus something dependable, the temptation of the familiar is terribly strong.
Which may go a little of the way towards explaining why I’ve resiled from my pending retirement and will be slinking back shamefaced to UCL for more teaching.
The joke’s on me, though, since the things I am familiar and comfortable with there have long been handed over to others. Whole new vistas of terrifying newness beckon. In at the deep end once again.