Reality could have been kinder to Bella Marcu. After staying home to take care of her late husband, who passed away in December last year, she was once more home-bound in Frankfurt, Germany, due to the pandemic.

Yet, throughout this period of social distancing — at age 79, she is at greater risk from the novel Coronavirus — she has not been alone. “Second Life has been and still is, a wonderful company for me,” says Bella, of the virtual world simulation game that encourages roleplay and socialising.

With the year on hold in real life, her virtual social life has been dynamic. On Second Life, sweet Mrs Marcu is a fashionable model, Anabelle Mayo.

“I have met interesting people, made friends and gotten to understand different cultures from all over the world, which is built to the original real life version,” she says. As Anabelle, she has also developed new hobbies, including taking up modelling courses, participating in fashion shows and learning Spanish at an institute in Second Life. The latter has come in handy in real life where she broadcasts Spanish and English songs as a DJ.

Second Life has seen a significant uptick in hours of play, as people are forced to socially isolate under the pandemic   | Photo Credit: Linden Lab

During the past five months, virtual life simulation games such as Second Life have been seeing a lot of play. The game, launched in 2003, saw 1,500 times more hours on mobile during the lockdown (March 2020 till July 2020) globally.

And it makes sense. Forced to socially distance, entertainment avenues in the real world may be few, but virtually, you can still visit hotels in different outfits, lounge around resort pools and solve puzzles, as in a game like Hotel Hideaway. Or roleplay, meet, flirt and date other players as in the more explicit multiverse, IMVU.

It is perhaps even more fun now to channel what could have been your life, if not for the pandemic, on The Sims 4’s realistic virtual world. You may not be able to go out, but the Sims you create can live in new homes, go on vacation, and start families.

Finding communities

If it’s Second Life that occupies Bella for two to four hours every day, Mumbai-based Gagan Gupta and his 11-year-old daughter’s current passion is Animal Crossing: New Horizons (ACNH). Here on a virtual island, his daughter goes to the lake to fish, while he finishes chopping wood. Deciding he does not like one part of the town enough, he relocates his neighbours — with their consent — to another location while he destroys the area to build it up from scratch.

Here, I am free (Clockwise from top) A screengrab from Animal Crossing: New Horizons; The Sims 4; Gagan Gupta and his daughter playing together; and a screengrab from Second Life Nintendo, Electronic Arts, Linden Lab  

The game, which puts you in charge of designing your virtual island and all its AI anthropomorphic animal residents, was released on Nintendo Switch in March this year, and has seen downloads by the millions. “I started playing on March 24 and I have clocked well over 350 hours in this game,” says Gagan.

“I hate to put it like this…” he explains the appeal of Animal Crossing, “but it’s like a dollhouse,” he laughs. The 42-year-old runs a gaming consultancy DTR and has been observing gaming in India for a couple of decades now.

While he agrees that it is action games such as PUBG that rule favour, the charm of virtual world building games lies in the creativity they require.

“Once you create things, you just keep wanting to go one step further in making it better. Some kind of an OCD takes over!” Gagan says.

His own island on Animal Crossing is rated five star and features elaborate flower arrangements, a camping site and a wedding area. Gagan’s Zen garden with its pebbled paths and peaceful running water ponds has a mostly-chilled out but occasionally fire-breathing Godzilla statue.

You can trade furniture and pop culture décor items like these on various groups on community platform Discord. There are currently over five lakh people on one such group Nookazon, where you can sell and buy ACNH items through Nookmiles tickets, which can later be used to visit other AI-generated islands on the game.

The players’ personal details are kept anonymous, as many may well be in their teens. But for 17-year old A Sahiti, the draw into virtual worlds over this summer, was not socialising with friends away from school, it was building new worlds at home.

A whole new world

“I miss my house,” Sahiti half-whines, sitting in her house in Dehradun. With her laptop given away for servicing temporarily, she has been forced to take a break from designing houses on The Sims 4, a daily ritual she has been devoted to, for the past couple of months.

Just before her laptop crashed, she was in the process of making a vacation home near hot springs and forests, for college-going friends. Before that, she made a Victorian-looking house for an elderly couple living with their granddaughter, a military bunker with a secret laboratory in the basement, and a modest home for an artist couple: “He is an artist, and she is a freelance photographer,” states Sahiti, adding, “I like building families and their homes. Even in real life, each house has its own story, you know?”

Sims allows players to build their own worlds and lifelike characters   | Photo Credit: Electronic Arts

If not for the pandemic, Sahiti and her friends had big plans for the summer before they left for their colleges in different cities. The Sims 4 is a decent alternative. You can be stuck inside a 2BHK on rent and still create mansions.

“It’s the power you hold over simulations’ lives that is addictive,” she says. The knowledge that few lives, albeit pixel, depend on your management skills keeps players hooked on to virtual life simulation games. In Animal Crossing the world runs on real life time; a rainy afternoon in August is the same in the game.

In Virtual Families, on the other hand, time runs faster. You can’t go to sleep assuming your creations will too. By the time you wake up and log on again, they will have caused chaos. So you need to compensate for your absence by, say, making sure that the fridge is well stocked.

Despite demanding such commitment, games like these have many fans. And that is because, “Whatever you don’t get to do in real life, whoever you don’t get to be in real life, you get to do and be here without any consequences!” says Sahiti.

For regular players however, the freedom to live completely alternative lives does not mean a drastic change in their virtual avatars.

Whatever she may look like, Anabelle is still Bella Marcu: a hardworking and energetic woman, cheerful and sincere in her feelings.

Explains Bella, “She is my virtual representative but clearly the character and the way she presents herself is my person. It is said that in the virtual world we play a role through our avatar, but actually, people continue their way of being and thinking as in their real lives.”