I shouldn’t have to tell anyone that the 2020s have been a miserable decade. It kicked off with a worldwide pandemic that has left us worse off in every conceivable way, and now the echoes of lockdown are returning at the worst possible time. Entire industries are starting to collapse, and that includes the one I’ve worked in my entire adult life.

I was laid off earlier this year, and found the market for nerdy writers has all but evaporated. I’ve been exploring other ways to use my skill set to pay my bills — including this very website — but I’ve also been in dire need of a way to self-soothe in the meantime.

Paying for new games didn’t seem like such a great idea immediately upon losing my income, so I began to search around for games that I already have access to that might keep me occupied. As luck would have it, I didn’t even have to scroll past the “A” section of my game list before I landed on “Arcade Paradise.”

The name and promotional material imply a heavy focus on replicating the arcade experience, and there is plenty of that to go around, but much of the moment-to-moment actually revolves around managing a laundry mat that happens to have some cool cabinets in the back. Every moment you’re playing “Video Air Hockey” or “Racer Chaser,” the washers and dryers are cranking in the background. And if you’re not handling them, you’re probably gonna have a bad time early on.

I had absolutely no intention of playing a laundry mat simulator when I booted it up, but I quickly found the repetition and slow progression to be a calming force. Instead of feeling stressed out about not working, I had something to soak up all of the idle processes in my brain that were causing me stress.

But more than the gameplay loop of wash, dry, repeat, the fact that there are nameless NPCs milling about that turn into voxelated messes when you approach them made me feel like body doubling. I was “working” while there were “people” around. It didn’t solve my core problem of being unemployed, but it let me get my mind off of it for once, and that’s not nothin’.

While the details of this adventure in intentional delusion are new, this isn’t the first time I’ve found solace by faking normalcy with a screen. When the COVID lock downs hit in 2020, I quickly found myself spiraling out of control when I was, at most, making a single trip outside of my house each week.

For months on end, I felt trapped as the whole world turned upside down. I found myself, strangely, missing the experience of just wandering around in public without a panicked urgency to leave before the murder virus infected me. That’s when I found footage online of people doing their shopping with a camera strapped to their carts.

Visualizing the process of something like casual shopping or loitering at the mall helped me feel like my skin wasn’t peeling off of my body for the first time in months. The strangers in these kinds of videos are on screen for all of ten seconds, but their presence really made a difference in my life during an extremely stressful time.

All of this is to say that I’d like to thank those generic NPCs that hang out in my virtual dad’s laundry mat for getting me through unemployment, but the people who really deserve the praise of the folks in who actually made such a delightful experience to begin with.

Image Credit: “Arcade Paradise,” Nosebleed Interactive & Wired Productions