Responding Creatively to Fear

I have a friend, Alex, who's a neurologist in Oxford. Next week, he's being moved to the front lines of his hospital's intensive care unit. Alex scored the highest possible marks on a personality test measuring how laid back you are, so it didn't surprise me to receive this:

I finally watched Outbreak on Netflix. Have you guys seen it? It’s soooo on the money, really recommend. You can tell it’s fiction though because the doctors have awesome PPE.

Some people are puzzled or even horrified by the idea of watching movies or playing games about viral outbreaks in the midst of a pandemic, but that only demonstrates how much our thinking has been warped by the recent obsession with positive psychology. No doubt there are those who probably wouldn't respond well to watching Contagion right now, but there are plenty more who like to mentally prepare for disasters through fiction and games: Station Eleven is one of the most-requested books at my library right now.

So, despite how much they might genuinely reassure some people, you won't see Plague Inc. or Outbreak featured in Apple or Google's digital shopfronts. Editors instead are promoting the most soporific or distracting titles they can find. They've decided that being associated with coronavirus in any way is a bad look right now, like the advertisers that have blacklisted any virus-related content – a move that's costing British publishers £50 million.

The end result is a curious flattening of affect from companies that can't ignore "these times we're in" but also don't want to feel like they're scaring consumers off. Which is fine – except for the way it damages the wider cultural world.

This is where I have to reveal my own horse in this race. My company makes an audio-driven smartphone fitness game that puts players into a post-apocalyptic world overrun with zombies. Across 500 missions, you collect supplies and search for a cure, and Naomi Alderman's story keeps people coming back week after week, year after year.

Last month, we came up with the idea of the "Home Front", a series of free weekly lockdown workouts with the conceit that a massive warehouse full of zombies had been released and everyone had to shelter-in-place until they'd dispersed. In between exercises and dance breaks, the characters talk about how hard it is to be stuck inside, so far from their friends. They reminisce about the everyday things they miss, like going to restaurant, and wonder if things will ever get back to normal.

Within our fiction, we tried to get as close to reality as we could, because that's what we felt people needed. We wrote, remote-recorded, edited, and released the first workout within a week. It immediately became one of the most-played missions in the app, and we've had hundreds of messages from people who've told us how much they valued it.

I'm not so naive that I expect an app about a zombie apocalypse to get featured by Apple – at least, not during a pandemic. That's just how they roll. Instead, they're featuring the usual anodyne tracking apps by Nike and Adidas. And I guess I don't expect the wider world of media to be interested in what we do, beyond the fact that we're fun way to spice up lists of "the ten best fitness apps". I didn't get into this business because I expected praise from the press.

But I'd also be lying if I pretended I wasn't resentful about being overlooked. Talking to a trainee journalist writing a piece on how fitness apps were adapting to the pandemic, I commented that while some games outlets are amazed by Duolingo rising from 168th most-downloaded app to 97th and Yousician going from 1,095th to the 406th, our app rose to 15th. In Germany, we were number one for a couple of days, outranking Zoom and TikTok. In all, we had 700,000 downloads last week, or 0.4 Quibis.

I know I shouldn't be resentful. I'm mostly relieved and grateful that I don't have to contemplate furloughs or layoffs. And long ago, I realised the corollary of being overlooked is being underestimated. I don't have to worry about other companies trying to compete with us, because they think we're a silly toy, not a game with close to a million active users and tens of thousands of subscribers.

It's satisfying to address the pandemic head-on, in a way that makes sense for our fiction and helps our players. And yet there's the resentment, first at being dismissed as too trivial, then being hidden as too scary.

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Things are changing, slowly. Here's how the latest Radiolab opened:

Hey, this is Jad Abumrad. Today, we're going to bring you an episode that we began working on about a year ago, and as we were getting close to finishing, everything that happened... happened. The pandemic, the lockdown. For a bit, we really weren't sure if this was the right episode to put out, in this moment. I even sent out an email to the entire staff saying, I don't think we should do this right now.

But I don't know. As we've been working on drafts, there came a point where my thinking kinda shifted. Like maybe this is something we can put out into the world right now. Maybe this is something we oughta do...

The episode is about a question Feynman posed his undergrad students: "If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence was passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words?"

Dark, huh? Not the sort of thing you'd publish during a pandemic. Or maybe exactly the sort of thing you should publish. Maybe this approach of self-censoring, this idea that everything will be OK if we say it's OK... maybe that's what's wrong.


Around 18 minutes into the episode, Esperanza Spalding ("musician and wolf-enthusiast") talks about the importance of fear; of how the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone Park created an "ecology of fear" that, through a cascade of changing animal behaviour, ultimately transformed the entire ecosystem for the better. She ends with:

Just ... having to confront regularly and respond creatively to a little fear completely changed the health and the landscape and the sustainability of the ecosystem. So maybe it's like... the willingness to respond creatively to fear, without trying to eradicate the source of the fear.

Spalding wasn't talking about the current pandemic – this was her response to "which sentence would you pass on to the next generation of creatures if all knowledge was destroyed?" But it's perfectly apt. We can try to eradicate the source of our fear right now, to distract and dissociate ourselves from it. And sometimes that's the healthy thing to do.

And sometimes it's better to do the opposite. To respond creatively to fear.