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coronavirus, COVID-19, gamer, pandemic, quarantine

RESTON, Va. — With America approaching a third month of quarantine due to COVID-19, gamer James Batson is reportedly battling a rare challenge: he is close to completing a game. 

“I haven’t actually finished a game since I was like nine years old,” Batson said from his home, where he was hoping to ride out the worst of the situation. “Usually I just kind of start playing something else and forget I was even playing the other game in the first place, but with all this extra time, I’m actually about to have to, well… to cross something off my list.”

Batson expressed fear that by completing a game, and subsequently moving to the next game with a sense of accomplishment, he may threaten his very life as a gamer.

“This whole thing really has me questioning if I’m even a gamer anymore,” he said. “What kind of gamer actually starts to clear out his backlog?”

Batson’s friend Ellen Jeffers has been tracking his progress through Twitch streams, and she expressed concern and disbelief at what was taking place.

“I saw he had put in about 76 hours, and I started to worry because that’s pretty deep for a single player game,” Jeffers said. “So I checked out his stream, and he’s ignoring all these obvious signs that the game is close to ending: tearful goodbyes, godlike enemies, literal text boxes saying the end is nigh, but he just kept going. He really should have spent some more time dicking around or doing side missions to stretch things out and keep this from happening.”

Experts see these occurrences as a grim portent of things to come. Games researcher and journalist B.B. Bray believes Batson may be on the vanguard of a rash of game completions. 

“Right now it’s just one guy completing one game, but soon there’ll be another and another after that,” Bray said. “And none of those are going to just stop at one game, meaning this will spread exponentially and soon, with production and the supply chain hampered as it is, we will quite simply run short of new games to play. And where will that leave us?”

At press time, Batson was attempting to pad out the remainder of the game by refusing to move faster than a leisurely stroll so he could “enjoy the atmosphere.”

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