Bea greatly enjoyed gossipy RPGs, for instance. When playing for another, it requires an awareness of their tastes and sensitivities. It is about telling yourself a story, acting a world out, as wittily as you can manage.
It requires a knack for framing, pacing, a certain stage presence, not just dexterity and strategy but an understanding of what abilities and systems say - or what they can be made to say, by tugging against the developer's intent and constraints. A videogame is primarily an expressive tool, even if the audience is simply the player herself. Playing a videogame for someone is a far more elaborate skill than just playing to win. But it wasn't and isn't my place to lecture Bea about how she spent her time, and besides, even a "bad" game can be uplifting if it's played for company. I am angry that she often had no choice but to distract herself with such things while she was relatively mobile, thanks to the burden of self-isolation placed on the vulnerable by the Tory government's unforgivable early decision to allow Covid to spread unchecked. I am angry to think of Bea feeding her remaining afternoons and evenings to games like Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, or the later Far Cries - games that have redeeming qualities, but which hinge on repetition, scale and conquest for its own sake. When videogames are bad they are the worst kind of art, produced at great cost to their creators and the planet, and made up of poorly dramatised, habit-forming busywork plugged into hollow, binary-coloured simulacra of broken value systems and still-active legacies of bloodshed and exploitation. Frankly, my time with my sister has left me with renewed loathing for the investment of hours and days videogames often demand in return for the mediocre enjoyment of, say, blowing somebody's head off in a "satisfying" way, or dragging out a theme any half-inspired short story writer could accomplish in a couple of paragraphs. This article isn't a claim for some special status for videogames as means of therapy.
The cards and dice rattle together the heroes strut about pushing each other down flights of stairs and getting into spats with the palace enforcers the lion cackles away on his throne at the heart. Wolf beats rabbit with enchanted axe, rabbit lures rat into magic bog, rat hires wandering circus to steal rabbit's best spell, which he uses to curse wolf with selenophobia. Rather than usurpers, I think of Armello's heroes as embattled caregivers, staging one last, outrageous courtly intrigue for the king as his sickness progresses. But I've found Armello a useful way of thinking about our situation - and about how playing a videogame for someone can be an act of care. Armello wasn't one of these games: it felt too close to the bone, not that Bea had many qualms during her illness about games in which mortality is the major theme (among those she picked for the whole family to try were Until Dawn, The Walking Dead and What Remains of Edith Finch). Bea and I played many videogames together, she and I being the geeks of the household. I've spent most of the intervening time caring for her at the family home, along with my dad, my other sister and my disabled brother. I began playing Armello a few months after my sister Bea was diagnosed with cancer in late 2018. But there is only ever one final outcome: the king will die.
The journey will be eventful either way, the balance of hero stats and the whim of RNG telling a fresh story each time. There are three routes to victory: amass the most prestige, defeat the king hand-to-hand before he succumbs to the Rot, or gather enough spirit stones to assume the mantle of healer, allowing you to cleanse your ailing lord and send him peacefully to the afterlife. By night, the king's corruption spreads to infest map tiles with hideous winged demons. By day, he sends the royal guard to defend or tyrannise the kingdom, and picks favourites from among the players - whoever is leading on Prestige gets to pass a law, such as a ban on magic. The computer-controlled king also takes his turn. Players draw cards each turn for weapons, spells and feats of trickery armed with these and pawfuls of glowing dice, they claim villages, embark on quests and duel each other in turn-based combat, seeking Prestige points or the means to breach the castle at the centre. Armello is a virtual boardgame about a lion king afflicted by a magical disease called the Rot, and the clan leaders, all different kinds of animal, who would replace him.