COVID-19 And How It Affected Theatre and Digital Entertainment

Abstract

The research I've done covers the effects that COVID-19 had on how people entertained themselves and how several entertainment industries had to change because of the pandemic. Because of COVID-19 inflicting mandates on social interactions, many adjustments had to be made to reduce the spread and make sure people stayed as safe as possible. By analyzing multiple statistics and reports on the matter, many people resorted to using strictly digital entertainment over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic because of mandates being enforced. Since being in public places wasn't safe, people had to resort to playing video games online with others, and theater companies had to move their services on to digital platforms. From the reports on how digital services in video games and streaming services has gone up since the pandemic began, digital entertainment has been rather satisfactory for both people and the companies providing the services. But with things slowly shifting back to the way they were before the pandemic, I don't think digital entertainment would be the option many people would resort to again. My senior project is a take on the COVID-19 situation but presented in a video game format. The user would be playing as a person going to an indoor theatre that features skits commenting about the situation. The project was created with the idea of combining my interests of both Theatre and Computer Programming into a single project. Keywords: COVID-19; Programming; Theatre; Video Games; Quaratine;