Remains of the Pandemic: How some apps, habits have survived and some have fallen by …

Last March, when the first nationwide lockdown began, 24-year-old Sanskriti made a WhatsApp group with her friends for playing online games to while away the unexpected windfall of time the pandemic had brought with it. That’s how she was introduced to Ludo King, the addictive multiplayer mobile game. “We were pretty hooked. It got to a point when we would be playing till 1, 2 or 3 am,” says the Mumbaibased dentist, who requested that only her first name be used. After a while, it was not just friends she was playing with — there were people on Twitter, sharing links to games, inviting anyone interested to join in. Housebound-India was in the grip of online Ludo frenzy, with some taking it to extremes — infamously, a man from Vadodara grievously assaulted his wife when he could not bear being beaten by her at the game. But a couple of months and many games later, Sanskriti’s interest waned. “We got busy with other things, like exams, and by July, my friends and I were bored of it. By August, it (our interest) was completely gone,” she says. One-and-a-half years on, the Ludo King addiction is a dim memory of the…
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