Quit Gettin' Mad at Video Games Pt. 1: Animal Crossing
Tilted.
Ragequit.
Sweaty.
Video games are a visceral medium to experience and share. Sometimes it feels like the exact thing that makes video games so much fun - we get plugged in, immersed, and washed over with the cutting edge of hi-tech Fantasia for as long as our eyes can bear it - is what can make our emotions so charged while we play them. I took a look at two games I’m playing right now that are, for better worse, representative of huge emotional waves in my life. Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare are 2019/20 sequels to two of the most important games of the 2000’s to me. Both games, though very different in tone, ultimately reveal truths about the way we emotionally invest ourselves into virtual experiences, and carry that import with us into the real world.
In this 2-part series, I’m looking at either end of gaming’s “intensity” spectrum to find out what causes all of the n00b tears and troll freakouts of the gaming community.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons on the edge of the event horizon
When I first played Animal Crossing on the Gamecube, it was 2002 and the “life simulator” could not have been more of a niche title. The hype train for the game at the time entirely consisted of myself and MIchael, the middle school friend who I would share my Nintendo Power issues with at our lockers. Based on the Nintendo-authored articles, the game looked sweet. The quotes were hilarious to us (“I caught a sea bass. See? Bass!”) and the art style oozed foreign kawaii influence. In the throes of the early adolescent search for individuality, Japanese imports felt like a cheat code, and the relaxed, village building experience offered a virtual home base in my family’s basement.
Upon release, the game lived up to the hype. The slow drip of new furniture in my shop each day, the unpredictable nature of visitors to the island, the charm, all of it was a delight to behold. Animal Crossing was a slow burner, with visits to friends towns few and far between when they had to be accompanied by a meatspace journey with a Memory Card in tow. These experiences were peaceful, friendly, and generous - although we had access to GameFAQs to help decipher the game’s secrets, the original game was more withholding with items than its sequels, so a traded stack of fruit could be a game-changing windfall. While we had access to GameFAQs and its ilk to anticipate and get excited for the game’s many seasonal events, these guides were crucially text based. The only images we had to get excited for the future were slow-dripped to us in Nintendo Power, monthly - and dependent on timely postal service.
Fast forward to early 2020 when the Animal Crossing: New Horizons leaks and media rollout were in full force. Most of the major video game outlets emerged over the embargo thresholds with hours-long videos of raw gameplay footage from early and deep in the game. Rippling out from this, various influencers screencapped, clipped and commentated on those videos, with their dissections offering a rabbit hole of information to dive down into. There’s no doubt in my mind that I would have fully fell the fuck down this if I were 10 years old in 2020.
Post launch, the deliberate pacing of the game is described by many online as if it were a deliberate slight against them by Nintendo for their perceived sins. “Time Traveling” is extremely controversial among players online. Back in my day, Mr. Resetti would give you a tongue-lashing for abusing the system clock to fast-forwards and backwards searching for rare items and high turnip prices. The average player with a little plot of land they work goes online to see how much everyone else is enjoying it, and instantly a feeling of FOMO is generated as they see everyone else’s EXQUISITE, DENSELY POPULATED, HYPER CHARMING islands. Plazas with custom tiling . Delicately, intentionally grown weeds in gardens. The funniest villagers. Things you can only attain through time-traveling - the thing the game itself has canonically shamed. In this way, the online meltdown over timetravelers feels less like a class struggle and more like a conflict between good and evil.
Click the image for my Animal Crossing: New Horizons custom pattern collection!
Perhaps the agita created by Animal Crossing: New Horizon’s design choices are simply heightened by the access we have to it in quarantine. Would I give a shit that I’m being “timeblocked” on stuff like an additional wing for my museum (which I have no Art to donate to anyway), if I didn’t have constant access to this game 24 hours a day? In middle school, there were so many logistical limitations to being able to access my Gamecube (school, homework, cross-country, my mom’s rules!!!). Living in a dense metropolis during COVID19, it’s obvious how there’s some appeal in an Island Getaway Package where I can actually get outside and talk to my adorable neighbors. That the creatures in Animal Crossing are mostly much more sweet and hospitable than my fellow Northeasterners is a huge bonus.
COVID19 isn’t the only extremely 2020 factor at play. The (for now) DLC-less flow of free in-game items inherent in the AC series feels generous in the time of the mobile gacha game and loot box. When the only thing limiting your creativity is time, time travelers may feel like they’re executing the ultimate AC strategy. And Animal Crossing is explicitly not a competitive game. The backlash from the rest of us is a cry of “don’t pressure me!” This all plays out over social media, which very much was not a thing at the series inception - the ability to tweet pictures out has created a metagame for many players based on Likes, Retweets, and whatever other Engagement Metrics and KPIs they’ve decided to stake their egos on.
Personally, I am very proud of my legitimately 60-day old island. I’ve had enough big plays on turnip futures that I have a ramp for every cliff, and some tasteful decorations in front of my villagers’ homes. Whether you’re time traveling or grinding out fish every day to pay the next loan, remember that we are here to work for these villagers. As adorable and witty as they may be, they are completely incapable of donating, shopping (though they browse Nook’s now), or doing any of the other things that make this island tick. And by the way, that loan isn’t paying itself. Get back to work!!!!
Stay tuned for next week, when things get M-Rated with an exploration of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.
