Confined Into One Space With an Opportunity to Explore Another
During these past few months, the corona virus has caused us countless inconveniences and forced us to make adjustments to our lives that we will never know the full extent of. But in these troubling times is an opportunity to tie up loose ends on thing we’ve always wanted to do, but never found the time to do. Sculpting, drawing, learning chess, trying a new language, whatever you would like almost. Sadly, from a personal experience I have still had to report to work all the same since the pandemic started. But honestly, even if I had the time, I don’t think even half of it would go to anything productive. And apparently, the same goes for several others across the America alone. Because according to the interview between Hans Vestberg’s, the CEO of Verizon and CNBC news, has said video game data usage has increased 75 percent shortly after the pandemic became more widespread in March.
And not with just phone applications either, but home gaming consoles as well. According to newsweek.com, on the March 10th, Nintendo’s online server was down for over nine hours because of overwhelming browsing and download activity. And Millions of other online gaming platforms find themselves struggling to keep their servers maintained as millions of players, sometimes well over 20 million, are online all at the same time. A similar downtime apparently happened to Xbox live two days before this. Even closer to home, my sister who has also been out of work for some time now, has begun to take an interest in gaming and asked that I download Call of Duty for her to practice. I was surprised by this since she hasn’t played video games with me since we were kids. When questioning her more specifically about it, she responded with, “I was playing Call of Duty at my friend’s house just because there was nothing else to do. But I ended up liking it and wanted to get better at playing it without having to go over every time taking the risk of getting infected. So, I said brother Bryce has a PlayStation 4 that I can practice and play with friends online. since I’ve got nothing better to do now, I was trying to get back into video games I used to.”
And according to the manager my local GameStop Sandra, one of the bestselling games of 2020 has been Call of Duty Warfare. Along many world-building games such as Animal Crossing and Minecraft and more violent games such as Mortal Kombat 11 and Grand Theft Auto V. In both styles of gaming these games can be stress relievers and competitive in both creating and destroying imaginary things. But there is a large opportunity to bring more people into the gaming industry partaken already by 164 million people in America alone. Though it will be difficult for people to fully indulge into the gaming world with so many struggling financially, the opportunity to peak more interest into a new form of entertainment will soon slip away as society slowly transitions back into normal life.
