What if I told you that in March 2020, people were visiting stores online, meeting and interacting with each other through a program, and making online transactions never seen before?
Sounds like the pandemic…right? Not quite; rather, I’m talking about Animal Crossing: New Horizons. And while I’ve never played it, I’ve watched enough streamers and youtube videos to get a sense of what it’s about: you build and manage your own virtual “world” in the game, complete with social interactions with other users. You can even own pets, furniture for your home, and visit friends.
So why do I mention this game? Well, my answer to the question at the start was a little bit misleading. Animal Crossing was my intended answer, yes, but it also represents my greater experience in quarantine. It represents how everything I knew shifted online and to my home.
First, let’s start with school, arguably the largest part of my life (it certainly takes up the largest portion of my day in terms of time!). At first, school went all online, and there were no zoom meetings. I was a bit bummed out to not be able to see my (then) senior friends, a grade above me, every day, especially given how it was their last year at North. I was bummed to not be able to see my other friends and classmates and teachers in person either; you don’t realize how much you need something until you miss it. Of course, I still kept in touch with as many people as I could, but it just wasn’t the same.
What ended up happening was I simply lost touch with these people. It’s simply much harder to engage with people online, when a classroom or lunch setting provides a much more natural situation to do so. For example, during peer tutoring, I would sit with a friend and we would talk about AP psych (which I haven’t taken) and he’d teach me interesting tidbits he’s learned from the class. I wasn’t able to do that once we went online.
And then, after a summer break spent at home, we returned to school—zoom academy, to be precise. I thought things would get better once that happened, but it didn’t. Instead of watching lectures from my teachers on my own time, I’d listen to lectures with black boxes; the social interaction with my peers that had been lacking months prior was, once again, not present.
But the thing is, with a whole summer behind me, I got better at running my own Animal Farm world, talking with people online. I got used to it, spending weeks and months inside, not seeing other people, not going to restaurants to eat, etc. And I had no basis to complain, because I knew that people were dying and suffering worse plights. (And here’s my reminder: even though vaccines are rolling out, and numbers are settling, we all continue to wear masks and not gather in huge droves because the next month is possibly the most dangerous—people already are starting to get lulled into a false sense of security).
Still, it wasn’t perfect, and it was the main reason why I opted to go hybrid when the option rolled around. Was it easier to check out, walk around, get food, and not pay attention at home? Yes, but that was one reason why I wanted to go in person—it’s so much more engaging there; more precisely, online learning is so disengaging.
And I think COVID-19’s unique challenge for my age group is precisely that—it deprived us of a year of academic engagement and social interaction, two aspects that I know personally affected me.