The Comfort of Childhood Media During Lockdown

Critic’s Notebook All I want to do is play Myst, an immersive computer game I was obsessed with when I was 11. We are entering Week 3 of social isolation, and I have regressed. The plush yellow duck of my youth has waddled out of storage and into my bed. Real pants are a distant memory.

And all I want to do is play Myst, an immersive adventure computer game from the 1990s that I was obsessed with when I was 11. Myst begins on a mysterious island, on a dock next to a sunken ship. As you traverse Myst Island — encountering riddles, age-worn letters and magic books that transport you to new “ages,” or levels of the game — you also unravel the story of Myst, which concerns an olde tyme teleporting family that loves drama. But the game’s real draw is its meditative atmosphere.

Much like in real life now, the player rarely encounters other people in Myst. It’s just you, an old windmill, an old library, an old lighthouse, an old rocket ship and several old clock towers. The gameplay involves clicking and occasionally dragging objects, but mostly wandering around befuddled. The soothing sounds of flowing water, crackling fires, flipping pages, groaning wooden elevators and satisfying mechanical clicks and whirs ought to be marketed separately as a sad-girl white-noise machine.

The sounds are also the keys to solving the game’s often-frustrating puzzles, which means I need to be listening to Myst all the time, as opposed to my husband. He recently solved his own puzzle, discovering that when I am holding my phone horizontally and am completely unresponsive, it’s Myst Time. Myst Time is the opposite of News Time, Twitter Time and Doom Googling Coronavirus Projections Time.

“The immersive beauty of Myst feels particularly suited to a quarantine: At a time when I can’t go anywhere, it makes me feel far away, surrounded by lapping waves and opulent rugs and actual mist.”

But sheltering in place has also activated a strong nostalgic urge. In this, I don’t think I’m alone. Last week, my colleague Astead Herndon imagined being quarantined with old Windows computer games like Minesweeper and 3D Pinball Space Cadet; I recently caught my husband playing a reconstruction of The Oregon Trail on a browser. (“You died of dysentery,” he told me.