How did it start

2020 has not been a kind year to anyone. It started with Australia burning and went downhill from there. There was also a small matter of the pandemic. Since I work in the health care industry, the burden of the disease was immediately apparent. The increase in cases and stress was pretty much exponential. For a while, the video games have been an avenue of decompressing for me. It is not a hobby any of my friends share with me, there usually is not anyone I can talk to about them. This started to bother me more during this year, probably a side effect of the constant stress of being in proximity of COVID patients.

Instead of talking about the games I was playing I decided to write everything down. It also helped that Persona 5 was the game I was playing at the time. Everything about it was stylish and beautiful. More importantly it tackled serious social issues. Persona 5 is not the first game to do so (it is not even the first Persona game to do so), but it did hit me at the right time. So, I started keeping a diary of my plays.

Writing down my progress was cathartic. I would avoid everything outside of the game. Whatever happened in my regular life rarely (if ever) found a way to the pages of my game diary. In the last few months, I have filled more than two journals with my thoughts on these games. I would like to continue doing this in the future (hopefully in a pandemic free time) and I hope others can find some thing of value in there.