2020s most popular games were my most reliable social spaces

This year, video games provided escapism for a lot of people. But for many, myself included, the games I remember most fondly in 2020 were the ones that became social spaces. The pandemic didn’t make me want to escape; it made me miss my friends and family.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons came out amid the shutdowns, and it quickly became my virtual island paradise, even when I wasn’t playing. I couldn’t log into Facebook or Twitter without seeing almost everyone on my feeds talking about Animal Crossing — people were sharing memes, asking for Dodo codes to visit their friends’ islands, begging for specific fruit that they wanted to grow.

Some turned to Nookazon, a third-party trading platform, to buy outfits they had a hard time...

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