Nintendo designed the Switch 2 with future global lockdowns in mind.

The Switch 2 is a social machine. For the console’s second iteration, Nintendo prioritized processing power capable of large-scale multiplayer. The Joy-Cons’ new C button lets you instantly join a group chat with shared-screen play options. Extensions in the Nintendo Switch Online app will add dimension to old titles, including autobuild-sharing in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. As producer Kouichi Kawamoto put it in Nintendo’s post-reveal Ask the Developer update, development of the Switch 2 was inspired by memories of “playing games together as children at a friend’s house or in a student lounge, where everyone brought their own consoles.” The clear goal is to bring frictionless community play to Switch 2 that will be safe for all ages.

The pitch is harmonious on paper and, based on footage in the Switch 2 Direct, existentially terrifying as a practice. Inspired by one of the defining experiences of the early 2020s, in which many of us were sequestered inside our homes playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Nintendo has, intentionally or not, optimized Switch 2 for the next global shutdown.

Work on the Switch 2 began in earnest in 2019, according to Kawamoto, and the early focus was on improving software performance through tech upgrades. But development soon became entangled with the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdown protocols forced Nintendo’s teams, among millions and millions of others, to work from home. The frustrations the team experienced while making the setup work led to one of Switch 2’s major features: GameChat.

“Back then, we were using a video conferencing system to check the software we were developing with our team, but the screen-sharing function built into the video conferencing system only allowed us to share one gameplay screen at a time,” Kawamoto says in the Ask the Developer interview. “So, we had each person place their game screen in front of their camera instead of their faces. When we did that, it felt like we were all in the same place, each bringing our own console to play the game together, which was a lot of fun. Based on this experience, we proposed adding a feature to Switch 2 where people can share their gameplay screen with other players.”

As demonstrated in a video Nintendo released on Thursday, GameChat looks and feels exactly like a Discord or Zoom call. After receiving a notification for a GameChat invite from a friend, a player simply hits the C button to open a multi-window grid that allows for the seamless continuation of play while peeking in on whatever their friends are playing and chatting back and forth. The sizzle reel shows up to four people participating in a call, playing games individually or together in multiplayer spaces like Splatoon 3 and Mario Party Jamboree. Players speak to each other using the onboard console mic and can activate video using the new Switch 2 camera accessory. If for some reason a Switch 2 player needed to remain in their house without making human contact for two to 12 months, Nintendo has them covered on the socializing front.

In many ways, Nintendo is beyond late to the game. Discord is right there, but even before the ubiquitous social platform, Microsoft strove for a similar connection when it launched Skype integration for the Xbox One in 2013, allowing for a party-chat-like experience. Nintendo’s dream of bringing distant friends closer together during remote play also predates GameChat; the Wii had the Wii Speak mic accessory and the few people who bought a Wii U had the ability to ring friends with Wii U Chat. But GameChat stands to be the cleanest collision of social and play on a console yet, and one with greater protection for kids thanks to Nintendo’s walled-off friend-list gardens. In the Switch 2 era, no distance will keep friends apart.

It’s a far cry from the vision for the original Switch. Nintendo revealed that console in a vibrant 2016 teaser that highlighted the hybrid console’s on-the-go possibilities. Players could kick back on the couch to play the new Zelda, or they could also traverse Hyrule literally anywhere else — in airports, in parks, huddled around a beer hall picnic table with friends. Those memories of “playing games together as children” were part of the Switch DNA too, with an emphasis on breaking down the living room walls. With the Switch 2, Nintendo has retreated back indoors, and wants us to lean in closer to the TV.

Nintendo hasn’t abandoned the hybrid nature of the console and it never will, but GameChat’s Zoom aesthetic is a jarring departure from the limitlessness of the 2016 Switch reveal. In Nintendo’s promo video for Switch 2, good-looking 20-somethings chill in each of their loft apartments, remotely chit-chatting with each other as one plays Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom and another explains the inner workings of Untitled Goose Game. In another vignette, a Japanese woman tells her three friends about a pizza place they once visited together in the outside world, which she has recreated in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, a game which has no negative connotations to our social reality whatsoever.

Read the news, and you know Nintendo is making a smart call. As has been widely reported over the last year, the outbreak potential of H5N1, dubbed “bird flu,” looms as the virus jumps from avian species to mammals. The fear at this present juncture is not just that H5N1 could evolve to affect a wider spread of humans than just poultry and dairy workers who contract it on farms, but that combating bird flu is looking more and more like a potential U.S. infrastructure failure. Scientists say bird flu has been under-addressed on a political level over the last few years, while the Trump administration’s mission to cut jobs in the health sector may impact the meager work that is being done. When asked recently what should be done about the continued emergence of bird flu, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s top health official, suggested letting it run its course through bird populations, which scientists seem to agree is a pretty terrible way of mitigating viral mutation.

That’s a lot of doom to erupt out of the introduction of Nintendo’s GameChat function, but then again, who could forget the time when GameChat would make the most sense? During my quarantine days in 2020, I spent an ungodly number of evenings playing Mario Kart 8 Deluxe online with a few non-gamer friends who lived just a few blocks away. Like the majority of people, the easiest way for us all to catch up face to face and talk a bit of smack as we swerved around Rainbow Road was to load up the Switch on the TV and a Zoom call on a laptop. With Switch 2, we’ll have GameChat. In a way, I pray we never have to use it.

There are less apocalyptic reasons GameChat is a tremendous advancement. There are families spread out around the state, the country, the world, who will come together to play Kirby Air Riders and feel closer than they ever would over a quick FaceTime check-in. The FromSoftware fans will have a helluva time screaming at each other as they embark on whatever The Duskbloods turns out to be. All of that will happen from the comfort of home — the same home, the same walls, the same sofa, the inescapable familiar.

The global population might completely avoid H5N1 or whatever the next close call looks like. Nintendo isn’t taking a chance. It has built a console for socializing in solitary confinement that, thankfully, still has a handheld mode. I’ll be taking it outside while I can.