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It’s a Perfect Time to Play Video Games. And You Shouldn’t Feel Bad About It.

The longer the coronavirus keeps social life and culture in isolation, the more we’ll need frivolity and escapism.

A scene from Skyrim.Credit...Bethesda Game Studios

Mr. Suderman is the features editor at Reason.

The last time I was unemployed was in the depths of the Great Recession. I had recently moved in with my girlfriend, who suddenly found herself with an out-of-work partner who rarely left the house. But she gave me some surprising advice: Play video games.

I would have a lot of time on my hands, she said, and while I could and should certainly do other things — housework, exercise, searching for a job — I would mostly be stuck at home with limited resources. Without something to occupy my mind, I’d go crazy.

She was right. Playing video games helped ease my mind, elevate my mood and possibly saved our relationship. This year we’ll celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary.

So now I’m going to give the same advice to anyone who is now out of work, or otherwise kept at home: Play video games. And don’t feel bad about it.

If you’re not a gamer, you might think of video games as simple time-wasters. But for those stuck mostly inside without work, killing time is a real problem. And in the world of big-budget console games, 10 to 15 hours is a fairly short experience. Some can take hundreds of hours to complete. There are online games designed to be played and replayed for thousands of hours.

But games are more than just empty time-wasters. In periods of pain, boredom or personal emptiness, video games can serve as palliative care for both the body and the mind.

Think of gaming as a personal stimulus plan for a nation of unexpected shut-ins: It’s not a long-term solution, it won’t work for everyone, and it won’t solve the underlying problems — but it can provide limited, temporary relief for some.

Video games take many forms, but they are all essentially simulations. And when the real world is temporarily unavailable, a simulated version might be what we need.

Among other things, video games simulate work: Even the simplest games give players tasks, objectives, lists of things they have to do, problems to solve and a sense of accomplishment upon completion. And the biggest modern games offer seemingly endless lists of quests and objectives, tasks and subtasks, systems to learn and skills to be mastered.

A game like the online shooter Destiny 2 offers hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of play, exploration and study. Set in an intricately designed sci-fi world, it tasks players with taking out wave after wave of alien enemies. It also rewards them for understanding a complex character progression system that involves completing ever-more-difficult goals and objectives, sometimes multiple times, in exchange for rarer and more powerful weapons and armor. You might not actually accomplish anything after a day spent checking off quests and gathering virtual materials, but you’ll feel like you did.

Game critics have noted the worklike nature of many modern games for years, not always favorably. But in a world of stay-at-home mass unemployment, even the illusion of accomplishment is probably better than none at all.

Indeed, the particular shut-in nature of our current crisis makes video games unusually relevant in a different way: What video games do better than any other medium is simulate places.

Open-world games like Skyrim, Red Dead Redemption II or The Witcher 3 are built around giant, explorable spaces, sometimes the virtual equivalent of hundreds of square miles, with elaborate geography and shifting weather. They can take days or weeks to fully explore and at their best can be unexpectedly beautiful, offering the opportunity to encounter animated versions of sun-dappled vistas or foggy mountain peaks, to wander through crowded city streets or stroll past others on well-trod footpaths. Games can give us someplace else to go.

That makes games useful in another way. Some of us are shut in alone. But especially in cities, many are now effectively trapped inside modest apartments with family or roommates, and little private space. Games offer a form of personal escape, a way to simulate being elsewhere from the confines of your couch.

And for those who are alone, games can also serve as social spaces, virtual fields of play for cooperative adventures or competitive contests. Many of today’s most popular games are online experiences that allow players to engage with friends as well as strangers, to forge digital versions of the same sort of bonds with teammates that can develop in the real world.

If you’re new at this, the cost of entry is fairly low: There are thousands of high-quality games available for phones, and many more available to download directly to your computer.

Even better, many big-budget games are free if you have a computer or game console on which to play them. Late last year, Destiny 2, released in 2017 as a full-priced game, reinvented itself as a free-to-play experience, with the base game available at no cost (players can pay for expansions). Several of the “battle royale” games that have defined the new wave of first-person shooters are also free: A relatively well-reviewed recent entry, Call of Duty: Warzone, offers several clever twists on the popular last-player-standing formula.

Not everyone wants to play online shooters, but for those willing to spend a little there are now subscription services that offer access to a large library of games for an annual or monthly fee. For little more than the price of a standard Netflix plan, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate offers access to dozens of games, from moody, philosophical puzzle games like The Talos Principle to richly animated platformers like Ori and the Will of the Wisps. There are sports games, strategy games, role-playing games and simple twitchy diversions that recall the arcade games I pumped quarters into as a kid.

And for those who not satisfied with our current quasi-apocalypse, there even games about viral outbreaks and attacks, from the strategic epidemic simulator Plague Inc., to the deftly scripted post-pandemic action game The Last of Us, to The Division 2, a military thriller set in emptied-out recreations of downtown Washington and New York after a viral bioweapon wipes out most of the population. Maybe that one hits a little too close to home.

Yes, games are frivolous. Yes, they are escapist. But the longer the coronavirus keeps social life and culture in isolation, the more we’ll need frivolity and escapism.

There’s a limit, of course, to what video games can do: They can’t serve as long-term substitutes for real places, real work or real human interaction. But they can give us a simulacrum of all those things at a time when the real ones are in short supply, and tide us over until the world we actually need returns.

Peter Suderman (@petersuderman) is the features editor at Reason.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 23 of the New York edition with the headline: Why You Should Play Video Games. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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