The COVID-19 pandemic brought with it many changes in our daily habits, the way we live our lives and how we perceive reality. First identified in December 2019 in China, it quickly spread and the first wave eventually reached Germany in late January 2020. Two months later it was declared a pandemic and several, non-pharmaceutical interventions have been established, among them what is referred to as ‘the lockdown’. These interventions have been relaxed once the first wave ceased and reinstated during the second and third wave.
Germany has not locked down her citizens so far: It has always been allowed to leave one’s room for essential and non-essential tasks alike, although a nightly curfew had and has been introduced in several states. Despite this ‘lack of lockdown’, the pandemic and the restrictions it entailed undoubtedly left a mark on (almost) everyone.
I am a student at a university in Munich, Germany, living in a one-room flat in a rather quiet corner of the city. Both my study and work have been switched to home office entirely. My social interaction has dropped to almost zero and only recovers if free time is carefully planned to include meet-ups with friends and family. The share of free but ultimately lonesome evenings sky-rocketed and are now filled with music, books, video games and whatever the internet has to offer.
‘Spaceship You’ is an 11 minute video by CGP Grey about productivity in times of lockdown1. Allow me to cite the first few sentences:
Pandemic season. This is not the first, nor will it be the last time, you lock yourself down and we isolate from each other to protect ourselves and to protect those more vulnerable than ourselves.
The practical effect of this isolation on you is that your home is no longer your home, but has transformed into a vessel that, along with many others, has left Earth to orbit around her.
Alone, together.
This image stuck with me. A vessel orbiting earth, minuscule in size, no sign of life but ones own heartbeat. We all orbit earth alone, together. That vessel has one corner each for living, studying, exercising and sleeping. Reality is contained within it. The world I see through my window, the world ‘out there’, certainly exists, but perceived reality fades and glitches once one looses touch. What meaning does ‘outside’ have if all you do is look at its borders? That window may very well be a painting on the wall, depicting whatever strange world its painter has conjured in times of phantastic inspiration.
As a child of peace and prosperity, war against an invisible enemy seems as far removed as an alien invasion. About a year has passed since the first ‘lockdown’ has been enforced in Germany. What may very well have happened yesterday also feels like forever ago. Imagining live before the pandemic seems difficult2, yet when trying to reminisce about what once was my reality, ‘now’ feels unreal. As if one transcended its borders and traversed into a surreal painting or delve into the sound-scape of a haunting concept album.
Back during the start of this pandemic early 2020, some may have already known that this pandemic would be no easy feat and would last several months, maybe even years. Maybe I knew that as well back then. But I certainly did not understand what it means to steer your spaceship in solitude for uncountably many orbits.
Plentiful free and lonesome lockdown evenings evoke a longing for
escapism. And what better way to remove oneself from reality than to
play a (preferably good) video game. After finishing Dragon Age:
Origins, a high-fantasy role-playing game from 2009 developed by
BioWare, I found myself craving for another fictional world I could
escape into. BioWare had a superb reputation during the 2000s3 and Dragon Age: Origins has
skillfully proven this to me.
So I continued to browse my game library in hope for another BioWare
title. And I just so happened to find Mass Effect 2.
The Mass Effect trilogy is a sci-fi video game series in which humanity has long entered the age of space travel and now shares the galaxy with several other organic and synthetic races. Its story focuses on the protagonist Commander Shepard solving ordinary video game tasks and ultimately saving the galaxy from apocalyptic threats.
The main plot and gameplay are both sufficiently well executed. The former sometimes exceeded my expectations, the latter in retrospect often crumbled into trivialities. Neither of them offer particularly interesting details right now. Most importantly, they aided in immersing me into a foreign reality of space travel, novel technologies and a multitude of extraterrestrial races4. Mass Effect 2 presents a well-crafted and altogether interesting universe to explore, reasonably authentic characters to meet and sometimes great stories to experience and shape. It allowed me to be fully immersed by the reality it presented while leaving my own, shortening hours of playtime into perceived minutes and always leaving behind the taste of excitement and novel experiences. Just like reading a well-written book or watching a great movie.5
At the end of one particular game session in late December, just after returning from another entertaining but ultimately trivial mission, I found myself wandering the headquarters, a spacecraft called Normandy. Catching up with crew members and enjoying the aesthetics of that high-tech vessel cruising through deep space, I absorbed the atmosphere of a place I have grown fond of. I took a final glance at the orange glow of the command deck with crew chatting in the distance, its satisfyingly symmetric design and the strikingly bright halo marking the path towards the bridge, all submerged in the familiar low-frequency drone of the Normandy flying through outer space. Then I concluded my session.
With my thoughts still caught in this alien reality, I looked around my room and out the entirely dark window. I had left a deliberately crafted universe of which I expect not a single aspect to be experienceable during the days and years of my life. This ‘reality’ is entirely imaginary: No alien race may ever truly stand in front of me, no spacecraft may ever physically carry me to distant stars, nothing will ever travel faster than light. Yet it has been crafted with such skill as that the immersion it created swiftly blurred the borders of ‘this’ reality and the one it offered.
I found myself standing in a warm and dimly lit room, staring outside dark windows, steering my own small vessel along the soundless orbit around earth. What had become my reality, confined by the walls of my room in that quiet corner of Munich, felt just as foreign and remote as the alien world I just left. Fighting an invisible enemy by eradicating social contacts and jailing oneself felt just as unfathomable as fighting an insectoid species riding rock-like spacecrafts.
At that moment, gazing out the pitch-black windows of that vessel I call home, the fictional world of Mass Effect and the world I found myself living in, although light-years apart, nevertheless shared a sense of irreality. As if this deliberately crafted sensation diffused from a fictional story into reality.
Although I expect no difficulty in returning.↩︎
Spoiler: Their reputation vanished.↩︎
Although most of them share a strikingly large number of phenotypical features with ‘us humans’.↩︎
Mass Effect 2 was originally released in 2010 and is
thus instinctively compared with much more recent and sophisticated
games. To counter this issue, I tried to explicitly scale down my
expectations. More modern approaches did solve a fair share of
problems Mass Effect 2 had: bland and unreasonably compacted
dialogues, a somewhat quirky graphical presentation, and the
generally dreary gameplay, just to mention a few. But in
anticipation of playing a decade-old game, I glossed over many of
its short-comings.
The others I modded out; a choice I do not regret one bit.↩︎