Making sense of the pandemic: Multiple functions of commercial video games during one year and a half of COVID-19 crisis

•We explore how playing commercial video games impacts on how players manage and understand the COVID-19 pandemic considered in its temporal evolution.•We conducted a longitudinal qualitative study by interviewing 16 participants during the first Italian lockdown and a subsample of them (N = 10) after one year and a half.•We show that playing not only supported “escapism”, but also encouraged reflection and sense-making.•We emphasize that the role that video games had in the crisis changed as the pandemic unfolded over time.•We present a preliminary model of the functions of video game technologies during moments of crisis.