Relax, Have Fun, and Befriend Cute Animals: How the Chillest of Nintendo Games Turned into a Raccoon Race

Why does a player cheat? Because winning is better than playing.

Animal Crossing used to be a heavily played game. But at its peak number of players, play took on an entirely different connotation.

The initial release of Animal Crossing in 2002 and the 2020 release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons highlight two distinct approaches to play in contemporary society. In the first, players imagine, explore, and relish in the mundane. In the second, players strategize towards an objective. Both present valid forms of play, which fall into categories laid out by Roger Caillois in “Man, Play, and Games”. Caillois classifies play into four forms: agôn (competition), alea (chance), mimicry (simulation), and ilinx (vertigo). While Animal Crossing’s core gameplay has always been focused on mimicry, encouraging players to engage in leisurely simulation, the 2020 version calls upon agôn in a way its predecessor did not. And alea, randomness, plays a newfound role in New Horizons’ invocation of a fluctuating turnip stock market known as the Stalk Market. One might even argue that its level of mimicry has dwindled compared to the original release as the game inches across the line between virtual and real. So how did the game’s crossover from relaxed mimicry to frenzied agôn, alea gambling, and hyperreal mimicry happen? The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the consumer use of Animal Crossing shows how people inhabit and design in opposite ways when the rhythm of life goes from 200 to 20 BPM (bells per minute¹).

The way a game is designed gives rise to specific affective states in any player of the game. The design of New Horizons allowed players to discover their own interiority as desirous, coveting, compelled to do more for longer and more frequently. But as one player we interviewed, Amber Chen, discovered by revisiting the game after the initial hype died down, New Horizons also allowed for players’ internal states to be sustained, open to various outcomes, patient, and unbothered. The game accommodates various types of play, from which the player is free to choose, however that choice can be greatly influenced by the context in which the player engages with the game.² By this logic, the two versions of Animal Crossing juxtaposed here serve as windows into their cultural moments. 

2002’s Animal Crossing provided a tranquil haven for the global community of introverts who enjoyed wandering through the game in single-player mode. In an article profiling an Animal Crossing player of 17 years, the gaming addict is quoted: “‘I’m a quiet person, not very social, and I keep to myself most of the time… I think the game is a great fit for introverts like myself’” (Koczwara). Digital media theorist and professor Aubrey Anable claims that “affect has the possibility of forming counter publics around the cultural expression of underrepresented feelings” (xviii). Jeff may be representative of a subaltern community that formed around the original GameCube version for introverts who felt overwhelmed, overstimulated, and bombarded by the pace of their lives. In the time that they alloted to fix themselves before the screen in solitude, their existence asked little of them. They were free to drift aimlessly in a sleepy town, where no one questioned their belonging and conversation was simplified to choosing from multiple-choice responses, often the only difference between responses being their degree of cheekiness.

Anable explains that individuals progress along their own rhythms, which, through common interaction with a game’s algorithm and aesthetics, can be impacted on the level of the collective (xix). She writes, “emotions have a social and political force that escapes conventional analyses of individual psyches and personal experiences” (Anable xviii). By giving expression to “underrepresented feelings,” affect in video games has potential to validate a collective whose shared experience has not been historically recognized on account of its location in the social and emotional realms. Anable situates the small affects of video game play in these realms, which find validation in feminist and queer theory. Animal Crossing (2002) was a video game that epitomized minor affects, traditionally dismissed emotions, and the ordinary aspects of culture that drift between labor and leisure. There’s hardly a better demonstration than Animal Crossing of truth in Anable’s remark that “boredom, as Siegfried Kracauer argues, is also an interesting and culturally significant feeling.”

Animal Crossing was designed to be relaxing, a break from the labor of people’s daily lives. The contrast of the rhythm of this game to the rest of life’s activities under capitalism is exactly what made the game popular and enjoyable.

Unlike Candy Crush, which is played in short intervals on a mobile device anywhere one pleases, and unlike The Legend of Zelda, which marches the player along a purposeful and detailed journey, Animal Crossing, with its polygonal, stout characters, enclosed and soporific neighborhood landscape, and menial tasks that amount to little generated a feeling of engaged tranquility. Clothed animals with disproportionately large heads spoke to the protagonist in a language called Animalese, which sounds like a chipmunk speaking gibberish in steady monotone.

The game even adopted the slogan “It’s playing even when you’re not.” Registering the time through the GameCube clock, the sun in Animal Crossing rose and fell over the town in real time. This feature held the player in a rhythm of life according to the actual turning of the Earth yet allowed them to move more slowly than they might have been able to at their productivity-oriented day job. One plugged into the GameCube simply to go fishing, rustle through leaves, and collect a couple eclectic pieces of furniture. The lulling soundtrack provoked no sense of mission nor urgency to progress. Every hour had an eponymous song, all of them lacking the tension and release quality that might build any sense of suspense or apprehensiveness. All of these affective devices of Animal Crossing did not amount to a mere subjective experience of the individual player. They both constructed and revealed contemporary feelings experienced across a wide audience, albeit in single-player mode.

In Animal Crossing, life is slow, action can be gratuitous and unlinked to future and past actions, and the self-contained world persists seemingly indifferent to the player. That’s what makes it so easy to exist in the world of Animal Crossing. It relied on non-linear, low-stakes tasks presented to the player via interactions with the virtual neighborhood environment.

The 2020 version, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, was also set up as a responsive environment that drives action in the game. But new to this version of the game was the degree of power players had to shape this environment themselves. “Animal Crossing [:New Horizons] creators Kyogoku and Nogami stated that they selected a deserted island as the game’s setting to differentiate it from previous Animal Crossing games, which are set in established villages, and to allow greater freedom to customize the game’s world” (Wikipedia). And with this growth mentality, players expanded the game space to include environments beyond the game itself. Amber recounted the turnip price forecasting sites, turnipprophet.io and turnip.exchange, and subreddit marketplaces, like r/NoFeeAC, that expanded the game space. Moreover, inter-player communication and interaction brought the unmediated social realm into the expanding world of the game. These aspects of “realness” in New Horizons seemed to raise both the stakes and the tempo of play.

The game happened to roll out with perfect timing, just as real life went into a spatiotemporal quarantine. The pandemic shocked the world by more than the disease, as we all recall the massive decreases in productivity, industry, transportation, and labor, captured in the expression “nature is healing” that captioned videos of animals, plants, and fungi spreading over suburbs and cityscapes during lockdown. For “non-essential workers”, the slowing down and sometimes complete halting of production and work inverted capitalist rhythms and frequencies in a way that reached people’s cores: minds were unburdened with commuting stress and job tasks, bodies were made to sit still, and spirits were isolated—at least until we figured out how to nourish the need for social connection virtually. Animal Crossing: New Horizons addressed these major drop-offs in our lives in two obvious ways: it allowed people to keep up their sense of productivity and progress, and it enabled social connection and the sense of community.

2020’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons provided a live community to more than the world’s introverts, with its record breaking 44.9 million units sold within the first year of its release. The game’s creators intended for the global release to allow for international connections between the players. And with New Horizons’ new game mechanics for accruing wealth and advancing in virtual society, global connectivity, expansion, construction, and abundance could offer spiritual remedy for all of us facing scarcity, separation, and enclosure. It seemed that as the game characters gained polygons in their meshes, the game’s players gained tasks and opportunities for productivity and somewhat linear progression.

The linear, progress-oriented aspects of Animal Crossings: New Horizons replicate our world’s hustle culture, consumer culture, and maximalist drives. For instance, the Nook Mileage Program grants players with flight miles for inter-island travel, rendering movement through the virtual space into a currency. The game tags the program with a maximalist, consumerist, meritocratist descriptor line: “Make the most out of island life. Earn Nook Miles!” In the same vein are some of the names of the game’s many rewards, such as “Hoard Reward” and “Go Ahead. Be Shellfish!” While the original version of the game allowed players to decorate the inside of their own homes, New Horizons places the focus on exterior design and decor, so that visiting other players’ islands perpetuates a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses covetousness. The game even refers to you as a “client of Nook Inc.”. The one-raccoon startup of the original game has clearly expanded into a hierarchical corporation—Timmy and Tommy, physically smaller raccoons and lower-downs on the Nook corporate ladder, employed to assist Tom’s land-owning, island empire (who inhabited these islands before all these animals staked their tents into their sandy soil?). You even get a gift of a Nintendo Switch, the console used to play the video game IRL, which signals some sort of meta, consumerist gaming agenda being gently put forth by the game. And maybe it’s just my own perception, but your character seems to run faster across the land in New Horizons than in the original Animal Crossing.

In a Medium op-ed, AC player Lexi Herbert complains about the new Animal Crossing: “The biggest con this game has to me is the way the villagers interact with the players. They kind of don’t. They feel like ornaments that are there to look pretty that are devoid of pretty much any character, which is the stark opposite of the original. They can’t even leave the village without permission, so you can quite honestly hold them hostage, which feels kind of bad to me. I get why it exists, but it just feels so messed up. They feel like dolls to collect, rather than living, breathing people in your world.”

While Animal Crossing: New Horizons emphasizes community, perhaps the way it does so is a mirror to our contemporary issues in community-building and maintenance. Social relationships in the early 2020’s have been characterized by what social media has termed “the epidemic of loneliness”. Whereas, in the original Animal Crossing, you’re forced to rely on neighbors to act in the game, delivering objects and carrying out personal favors, in New Horizons you are better off relying on yourself to comb through the internet in order to gain the maximum amount of bells and trick out your island for all to see.

Herbert also commented that New Horizons “…just didn’t fill the same void that the original did.” Instead of reading this as a criticism of the new version of the game, we can read it as evidence of whatever void existed in the first place. The video game is expected to satisfy something that real life does not, at least for Lexi Herbert. So we have Animal Crossing to thank for providing some insight as to how our real life society falls short of meeting our needs and desires.

The first Animal Crossing was released in 2002, the same year that a mild recession hit the United States following 10 years of economic growth and high employment rates. Animal Crossing for GameCube reached peak popularity in July 2006—at that point 1.3 million copies had been sold in the United States and a film adaptation of the game was released in Japan under the title Gekijōban Dōbutsu no Mori. During the five years between 2001 and 2006, the US saw a steady decrease in both income and employment rates for the younger working population, especially those under the age of 25, the same age group predominantly playing Animal Crossing. Perhaps this recession, the slowing down of labor and wealth accrual especially among people under 25, was conducted by the same metronomic deceleration in society that gave rise to Animal Crossing’s simultaneous rise in popularity.

https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2023/the-long-shadow-of-the-2001-recession

According to the Animal Crossing: New Horizons Wikipedia page, “The developers were very disappointed when the game’s release cycle overlapped with the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to quarantine during the pandemic, Kyogoku hoped that the game would be an ‘escape’ for fans at the time.” The game begins with your acceptance of Nook’s Deserted Island Getaway Package and then boarding a plane to the island, which was an especially thrilling simulation when in reality, flights were being canceled and delayed around the world.

More than an escape, New Horizons allowed players to dream of starting a new society during a time when society was shut down. The pandemic prompted many people to reevaluate societal structures as well as their own lives. So we might be disappointed that, given this opportunity to dream up a new system, millions of people reinstated capitalist rhythms in their lives by playing the game—with its faithful recreations of systems like stock market exchange, urban expansion, and consumerism—but we can also be curious as to why our laboring habits followed us and were even amplified into an obligatory resting period. Perhaps the stress of the pandemic’s unknown trajectory frightened us into recreating familiarity. Or maybe, like warming down after an intense workout, we just needed to gradually wean ourselves off of our busy working routines.

Some games bundle fun with education, like wrapping medicine for your dog in cheese. Other games promise pure fun and entertainment. Sometimes fun is easy, sometimes it’s hard. When we are mindful of the doses of labor let into our play spaces, we are better prepared to protect within ourselves that which labor can take away from us.

Is labor always extracting from us? Is investing not extractive of our energy, our time, our peace? Do we seek these debts and transactions because of the affects those provide, or because of the sense of purpose that waiting, hoping, and building give to us?

Appendix: Reddit Thread

Footnotes

Works Cited

Anable, Aubrey. “Video Games as Structures of Feeling.” Playing With Feelings: Video Games and Affect, University of Minnesota Press., 2018, pp. vii-xxi.

Koczwara, Michael. “Animal Crossing Superfan Has Maintained His GameCube Town For 17 Years.” Kotaku, Kotaku, 7 June 2019, kotaku.com/animal-crossing-superfan-has-maintained-his-gamecube-to-1835281065.