Forza Horizon 4 is more than just a racing game: for a while, it was my connection to home
It’s World Mental Health Day, and it’s a subject that we’re all affected by on some level, whether it’s ourselves who suffer with it or someone we know. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s probably affecting a lot more of us than ever before: this collective trauma we all went through, where the world stopped for a moment, and none of us knew if it would ever start back up again. During that time, Forza Horizon 4 got a next-gen update on the consoles we were then still able to call “next-gen” without getting shouted at in the comments, and I got a little obsessed.
For those of us living far from where we grew up, our loved ones felt further away than ever before. The interlinked world we were accustomed to boiled off in the heat of panic leaving a sea of tiny islands: millions of households that suddenly had to host entire lives within them. In normal times, we plod along comfortably in the knowledge that our parents, children, friends, cousins – whether we have the time or money in that moment to actually visit them – are only hours and pounds away. It was a simple matter of numbers, until we fell hostage to an entirely different and far less simple matter of numbers.
Video games helped many of us bridge those newly insurmountable divides. Animal Crossing became a sanctuary away from the bleakness of the pandemic, providing a tangible way for us to visit each other in a cutesy world which sat comically juxtaposed to the ravaged world beyond. Games stepped up to provide meeting places of all kinds in lieu of access to real ones: from Minecraft to GTA Online, multiplayer environments took on a whole new dimension of social significance by virtue of the fact that they were no longer an addendum to the real world, but a replacement for it.