I mean, unless your friend was into politics, it wasn't so tough in the 80s. At lest for the more commercial music. Punk or Metal people have it hard, but Jazz or Pop/Rock was ok.
For non CZ/SK people reading this. This story is an extremely niche example of "anti" communist games.
For example, transgoogle this article https://gaudeo.sk/jaro-filip-online/ and watch the video posted there, which is from 1986 and it was airtimed in the state television as an 8-episode-long series.
Jaro Filip, the guy from the '86 video is openly saying that he is playing Alien 8 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv6yLoibUS0 and he is joking about it quite casually.
By the way, the first official games/programs distributor for CZ/SK and even UK/US titles was probably Ultrasoft. These games in the article were not official games, well, there wasn't a market for this thing in the 80's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasoft Maybe you will know titles like Quadrax, Jet-Story or Tetris 2.
Then start looking online or start your own business (using Elixir because it is the easiest and least money-expensive for a single developer) and stop blaming the whole world. Internet is everywhere. So, if you can't move to a bigger city to find Elixir jobs, look for the remote position, working from home is pretty normal for at least a year now. Or, as I said, start your own online projects using Elixir. Again, using Elixir and its ecosystem is the easiest for a single developer. To be honest, people who operate in the Elixir ecosystem are often much better programmers (and thinkers; a much welcomed side product of functional programming) than JavaScript people where the quality of code is usually much worse. But it's partially the problem of JavaScript where it's easier to write bad code. And Elixir is much better especially for big projects than JavaScript. Maintaining a big project in JS vs Ex? Elixir is much much better at that. Programming things in JavaScript is torture. In Elixir it's pleasure. It's like the improved version of Ruby, very nice language.
It's the same as with your mobile phone when you lost your wi-fi signal. Everything pauses and everybody has to wait.
Have you played games like HOMAM 1 or 2? You can't do anything when the CPU is playing its players. You can watch where he goes and what he does but that's it. When he is finished then you go.
When there is a network error - some message or please wait... or loading spinner message should be shown in the meantime.
For turn based RPG games or Chess etc. this is a non issue.
Of course, real time action games etc. is not a good idea for this technology.