June 2020 – joemac.io

Full disclosure: I am an employee of Arlington Public Schools, a K12 school district in Virginia. These thoughts are my own and not of the district or any school.

Two weeks ago, our (then) interim Superintendent distributed (to the public) a presentation about various scenarios of schools reopening in the fall. The scenarios are basically:

Open schools normally, which they say is the “least likely” scenario.
Open schools “sort of” with social distancing guidelines in place and reduced class sizes, a hybrid of distance learning and not.
Open schools with full distance learning, which is described as the “likely” scenario.

As time goes on, and the COVID-19 pandemic abates, and we are engaging in a national discussion about the many parts of systemic racism, and how inequitable access to learning opportunities feeds that beast, I have no idea how we are going to start school with distance learning, or if we can even really consider that a viable option anymore.

Virginia is Reopening Rapidly

As the health metrics for COVID-19 improve in Virginia, the state is continuing its reopening process – we are currently heading to Phase 2 of reopening as defined by the “forward Virginia” presentation from the Northam administration and the Virginia Department of Health. From the presentation, Phase 2 is to last 2-4 weeks or more, which liberally puts us at July. Phase 3, which is more-or-less a return to regular operations, is “10-12 weeks away, or more” – but my interpretation of this is to mean 10-12 weeks away from Phase 1, which is already ending or over for most of the Commonwealth, so we are talking about Phase 3 starting right when school would start.

Risk Consideration

Looking at this timeline, the case for full distance learning seems pretty weak when we consider:

Dr. Fauci is apparently now leading the charge on “thinking about schools reopening.”
The risk of COVID-19 to children is demonstrably low.
The economic impact to at-risk communities of children staying home for distance learning.

Here is the situation: we already know that Black and (especially in Arlington) Latinx communities are disproportionately affected by COVID-19. They are also disproportionately affected by unemployment. They are also (again, especially with the Latinx community, and especially in Arlington County) disproportionately affected by unemployment directly from COVID-19. The children of these communities are the ones who are most likely to receive free or reduced lunches, have no or inferior access to the internet, and are the reason school districts like Arlington’s have an office of equity and excellence.

What about the children?

How do we educate this community equitably when the parents of these children, who have lower-paying service jobs in industries that have been the hardest hit by COVID, are offered their jobs back? The additional funds from the CARES act are slated to expire at the end of July, and when September comes around, Department of Labor guidance isn’t clear on what happens next for primary caregivers of children in the 2020-2021 school year:

“A school is not closed as a direct result of the COVID-19 public health emergency, for purposes of 2102(a)(3)(A)(ii)(I)(dd), after the date the school year was originally scheduled to end.”

Does “the school year” mean 2020-2021 school year as well? If districts move forward with a hybrid opening, this would seem to not apply. It would seem like it does apply for families if districts go fully distance learning, but again, this is after CARES act funding runs out, and $378, the maximum unemployment benefit in Virginia, does not go very far in Arlington.

This is while children of wealthier white parents, who have more of an ability to work from home and have more flexibility to hire caregivers and private tutors, have more opportunities to access a quality education during a full distance learning scenario.

The issue of child care (school) and faced with the prospects of being out of work without access to financial benefits, especially for minority and at-risk communities, seems untenable. It also seems unlikely that we will be able to get children to follow social distancing guidelines.

Our options (assuming a vaccine isn’t completed before September, also not likely) seem to actually be:

Reopen school as normal, and do our best to follow social distancing guidelines, and accept the risk of COVID spread.
If we do distance learning, greatly expand financial and unemployment benefits to families of at-risk communities, which is not something a school district has the ability to do, and with Fauci now calling for schools reopening, seems almost an impossibility.

Neither of these solutions seem good. I don’t have the answers, but we need to be talking about this and figuring it out – quickly.

Note: I started working on this post before the killing of George Floyd, and took a break from it to get some of the included video content. In the events of the last week, it feels like the national conversation has shifted from talking about COVID-19 to police overreach and the Black Lives Matter movement. I don’t address that in the post and I don’t feel like it’s appropriate to talk about with my “hurr durr video games” content, so I leave the original post unchanged.

I decided a few weeks ago that my COVID “support the economy” purchase would be a gaming laptop. I’d been interested in one for a while and with no other way to play Half-Life: Alyx, I figured it’d be a good time to spring for one, seeing as how there is little else going on during my copious free time, except for blogging, apparently. Oh, and yardwork.

I ended up getting a higher-end model of the Alienware m15 R2, after I figured out I could stack a fairly generous $600 off discount with an education discount and a 10% off promo code. All this to say, they just spec’d and are on the verge of releasing the Alienware m15 R3, but that’s how it goes with gaming gear.

I haven’t owned a gaming PC since I built my own, but that was back in 2013 when Ashley and I lived in Boston, and I picked the parts up from the Micro Center on Memorial Drive. Since then I’ve only owned consoles, and when I fired up the Alienware I was pretty blown away by the performance. They’re not even paying me to write this!

Since deploying games as a service seems to be going mostly pretty well for publishers and consumers, the obvious play was to download some games from my pre-existing Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription, and while I was at it, I signed up for Origin Access.

But what games do you play during a pandemic? As an older gamer, my bar for “this game feels like work now” is pretty low, and exacerbated by the stress of pandemic life and trying to raise a baby.

I want to use my brain, but I also kind of want to be a vegetable. Naw mean? This means Monster Hunter World is still a hard no, but I do have some recommendations for some feel-good, low-stress fun.

1. Old Arcade Games

I’ve always been a fan of these and a lot of them still hold up, especially the good stuff from the Neo Geo era. We can dive more into that in a later post, because it’s something worth exploring, but in general, the good Neo Geo stuff just has a…look. You know how Donkey Kong Country for the Super NES came out in 1994, but if you play it today, it still looks pretty good? SNK and associated developers employed a lot of talented artists. Check out NMK’s ridiculous Zed Blade, also from 1994:

Why does this work? Well, if you look at the 16-bit renaissance, the vast majority of these games aren’t actually using 16-bit assets, so if you’ve tried to play CrossCode (which is on Game Pass, but strangely only for PC), it looks like an SNES game, but…spiffier. A lot of this newer stuff looks like it could’ve originally come out on the Neo Geo.

2. Gears: Tactics

I’ve never been able to get into XCOM, the game/work barrier was always just high enough that despite a few attempts, I bounced off. Gears: Tactics has simplified a few things, complex…ified…a few things, but has turned up the fun factor and made a very Gears feeling game in the process. At the same time, due to the turn-based nature of tactics games, it scratched a nostalgic itch. When I was younger, my dad used to paint miniature pieces and we’d play the games in his basement with dice and a ruler. His setups were pretty elaborate, like something you’d see at MIT’s tech model railroad club back in the heyday, with terrain, mountains, obstacles, etc. If you’re familiar with this kind of thing, you already know how to play a tactics game.

Anyway, Microsoft had to pull off making a tactics game that employed the Lancer chainsaw, and boy howdy!

My experience with Tactics is that it hasn’t been all that difficult, but I did just wrap the first boss, and the fight got pretty tense; I didn’t lose any heroes, but skated just barely by to finish him off on the first go. The boss fights are asynchronous, so your team of 4 characters against a single, very powerful foe. I actually had to turn off reruns of Miami Vice for that one. (One complaint, the “across the bridge” fight leading up to the first boss goes on a little too long.) The enemy variety has picked up after the first boss and it’s an excellent game to unwind, along with a glass of your adult beverage of choice. Gears: Tactics is PC-only (for now), and doesn’t seem too demanding, my new hardware runs it buttery smooth on Ultra Settings.

3. American Truck Simulator

I have played many an hour of ATS while listening to Marty Robbins, the Giant Bombcast, or Dan Carlin. don’t have a crazy setup for ATS, and am happy with using an Xbox One controller. Even if this is not typically your bag, if your car has been sitting in the driveway and you need to hit the road, give ATS a shot.

4. Just Cause 3

Just Cause 3 got a bad rap, its launch marred by a litany of serious performance problems on consoles. Square Enix has done a pretty good job patching a lot of that out for console, and I was able to get a copy of it from Square Enix’s “here are 54 games you probably won’t play, but it’s for charity” sale earlier in the month. I still get some hitching on PC, but for the most part, it runs great, and runs very well on my PS4.

If you’re not familiar with JC3, the premise is this: you play as a Latino Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the game is basically 1985’s Commando. Rooty tooty, boom n’shooty as you try to cause as much destruction as possible to overthrow a corrupt government.

Also, you get a mech, because why the hell not?

5. Ori and the Will of the Wisps

It demands your attention, so Crockett and Tubbs will have to wait while playing Ori and the Will of the Wisps, but it deserves to be on this list. When you’re stuck inside all day, Ori gives you a sense that you actually explored something and saw something new. It has a beautiful, outdoorsy art style, moving soundtrack, and relaxing vibe. Wisps, especially compared to its more straightforward predecessor, takes a few pages out of Hollow Knight‘s book, but in general is a lot more forgiving with extremely generous checkpoints and no punishment for failure.

I am playing Wisps on an Xbox One X on a 4K monitor with HDR, which my laptop doesn’t have. In my opinion, HDR goes farther in a game than it does in a movie, and if you have access to the same setup, Wisps is a benchmark for why HDR in games is worth the investment.

Honorable Mention 1: Legends of Runeterra

LoR is a mobile DTCG (digital trading card game, I just made that up) in the same vein as Magic: The Gathering that introduces some new elements to freshen things up. I’ve enjoyed playing a round here and there, but as a mobile game I haven’t dove in too much.

Honorable Mention 2: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare

By hours played, I’ve put more time into CoDMW than any other game in the last 6 months. I’m decent at the multiplayer, and finally finished the campaign and enjoyed it. At a 7-ish hour length, I realized how so many “open worlds” are full of filler content that really isn’t all that good. Still, it’s heavy stuff, and it took me a while to get into the campaign. The torture scene could have been left out. MW’s multiplayer/online community is surprisingly tame, and I much prefer the lower-stakes plunder mode than the more traditional battle royal mode in WarZone.

More to come, but that’s what’s been keeping my free time occupied in the last few weeks. If you have a further suggestion, please do leave a comment below.