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Forget resurrecting a sourdough starter, filming TikTok videos, or binge-watching “The Crown”.
In the quest for virus-free entertainment during the pandemic, my friends and I meet regularly on Zoom to play a steamy online game that features jokes about sexual practices, Miley Cyrus, vegans and the characters of “Star Wars ”.
Of course, it’s juvenile. But, hey, watching the leaven rise can get really dull really quickly.
I am not alone. The worst pandemic in more than a hundred years has turned the country’s most popular social activities – movies, concerts, sporting events and travel – into potential health risks. This has prompted Americans to find new hobbies that don’t involve face-to-face interactions.
Take, for example, watching streaming TV. Disney + exceeded the expectations of executives at Walt Disney Co., reaching 73.7 million subscribers as of October 3, up from around 60 million three months earlier.
Spending on video games in the United States also broke records, reaching $ 11.2 billion in the July-September 2020 quarter, up 24% from the same quarter last year, according to NPD Group, a consumer and retail data company.
This year’s successes, fueled by the pandemic, have included “Animal Crossing: New Horizons,” in which players develop their own islands and can visit friends, and the free-to-play “Among Us”, a party game. in which the players try to play which of them has been designated as the saboteur.
“We’ve seen a huge, massive increase in every metric we measure for the gaming industry,” said Peter Basgen, director of partnerships for Arsenal, a gaming data analytics company.
But, he said, in recent months, the most popular category of Amazon-owned game streaming platform Twitch wasn’t about watching people play games. The category is Just Chatting, which features people talking on camera about food, tech, and other topics.
It may reflect Americans’ growing effort to connect through good old-fashioned conversation, said Pamela Rutledge, professor of psychology and social media and technology expert at Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara.
“People have to be very creative to connect,” she says.
The game that has kept my friends and I connected doesn’t involve anthropomorphic animals or a malfunctioning space station. After all, we’re mostly empty nesters in our fifties who haven’t played video games since “Pac-Man” and ankle warmers were all the rage.
Instead, we got hooked on “All Bad Cards”, a free game reminiscent of “Cards Against Humanity”. Players earn points by entertaining each other with the funniest and most depraved responses to fill out statements. And there’s no need to download anything – all you need is an Internet browser.
“All Bad Cards” can be played while participants chat on a Zoom call – replacing that face-to-face interaction most of us have lost due to the pandemic.
For my group of friends, the games are usually interspersed with conversations about the events of our week or grumbling about the polarization of our country. Often times, games are interrupted by a family dog barking in the background, an internet connection failing, or a tragically empty wineglass.
After the game launched in April, it gained popularity, quickly overwhelming its small server, said Jake Lauer, the game’s creator. The games site gets up to one million pageviews per week and up to 10 million minutes of use per month, he said.
If Lauer’s numbers are correct, “All Bad Cards” is about as popular as some of the most popular online browser games. “Slither.io,” in which players control worms that consume light spots, and “Agar.io,” which features round cells that attempt to eat a gelatinous substance, show similar numbers, according to Comscore, an analysis and a marketing data company.
“All Bad Cards” is not even Lauer’s daily job. The 31-year-old is a senior engineer at Bungie, Bellevue, Washington, the video game developer behind “Halo,” “Myth” and “Destiny.” He said the idea of throwing “All Bad Cards” came to him during a conversation with his sister-in-law when stay-at-home orders were first announced in Washington state.
“We were saying how hard it was not to be able to see each other and how crazy it is that everyone in the world is going through this same struggle,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be nice to do something normal together?”
Lauer said he created “All Bad Cards” as a tribute to “Cards Against Humanity”, one of his favorite games.
The creators of “Cards Against Humanity” did not respond to a request for comment.
At first, Lauer asked players for donations to help them recoup the $ 700 per month it was costing him to rent server space. The popularity of the game grew and the costs rose, so in August it stopped asking for donations and started running ads through Google on the game’s website. The game remains free, although users can pay. to remove ads or access extensions.
Lauer declined to say how much revenue the site is making, but said it was enough to cover the now increased cost of server space.
“My plan when I launched the site was to pay for it out of pocket as long as the states imposed quarantine, because I knew a lot of people would be out of work or bored at home and needed a kind of emotional reprieve, ”he told me.
He was right.
For several months now, my weekly “All Bad Cards” games have been like a regular gathering of friends in a bar. We’re kidding. We tease. We tell debauchery jokes and laugh, forgetting for a few hours that the world seems to be falling apart around us. It’s a taste of those human ties that the pandemic has stolen from us.
My regular group is made up of two therapists, an emergency nurse, a community college instructor, a caregiver and a sales manager, among others. On the game’s website, we give ourselves less professional nicknames like JoJo Rabbit, Gale Wild, Mr. Ed, and Cactus Carlos.
Players take turns reading the prompts, structured as fill-in sentences. Each other player looks at the answer options on the virtual cards in their hand and chooses one that they think fills the gap in a fun way. The fast reader’s favorite wins the round.
The guests are generally very calm. An example: “I love ____, it comforts me.”
But the potential answers can be hilarious. Some of the most suitable options for families:
◆ “a turtle in a turtleneck”
◆ “The Sweet Side of Ted Bundy”
◆ “a disorderly colonoscopy”
◆ “applaud when the plane lands”
To win consistently, you need to assess the sense of humor of the person reading the invite. Are they rude and vulgar or daring and dry?
Lauer said it was more difficult to write the prompts than to write the answers because the prompts must have meaning when a verb, noun or plural noun is left blank.
“One of my favorite cards I’ve written is just the word ‘moo’, which doesn’t make any grammatical sense with prompts, but it always gets a laugh,” he says.
What will happen to such games once the pandemic is over? Experts agree that Americans will likely continue to connect to each other through online games and video chats, as technology has made it much more convenient and faster than before.
“If connection is the goal, we now also have other tools that allow us to connect with the people we care about in another way,” said Rutledge. “Ultimately, they enrich our relationships.”
For my group of “All Bad Cards” friends, this could be one of the only silver liners to come out of this pandemic.
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