Pretty Excited about the New Stuff Coming Soon

Animal Crossing came out at the perfect time – right in the middle of the lockdown. Being able to totally control an island down to the ground level or below gave us all the feeling of control that we really needed in a time when there was little control around. 

I played hundreds of hours of this game in the pandemic, spending most of my mornings fishing, chopping wood, collecting fruit, and delivering various insects to the Owl that runs the museum. Everything had a place, a category, a value. The animal neighbors were eccentric, but peaceful. They made demands in a dream logic form, easy to accept and dismiss since they would not be detached from the animals. Once in a while you could deliver something for one of them or get them a fish, and they would be happy for a brief second. For the neighbors, time was an eternal present of desire – whatever was on their mind, they’d say it, and that would be it. 

There’s a big update for the game coming in a few days and I’m more than excited although with my schedule I am not sure I’ll be able to play it. I’ve been getting on Animal Crossing from time to time, when I can, in order to sort of “get ready” for all the changes coming – farming, cooking, new neighbors, a coffeehouse, and most importantly the Gyroids – strange musical clay pots with faces that I believe are the ancient gods of the Animal Crossing universe (this is a minority opinion). 

Years ago, my dad encountered animal crossing when my youngest sister was playing it on the Game Cube and remarked that the game was overwhelmingly and surprisingly capitalist. This is not unique to Animal Crossing; most games have some sort of mechanism for making money and then making more, but Animal Crossing does have a bank, public projects, and many vendors. I would say that instead of being capitalist alone – that is valorizing the accumulation of the means of exchange as a game object – Animal Crossing is a fantasy representation of colonization, where there is no downside whatsoever except for regret.

Let’s deal with the downside first. Regret – I have heard this expressed from my friends who overdeveloped their islands to the point where they are unrecognizable as such, where there’s no distinction between inside and outside. Every part of the island is perfectly curated in the modality of a shopping mall – the inside is the outside, the outside is the inside. Every part of the island is a room, making the house a palace where the value is the representation of non-indoor spaces, or rooms that could not take place at all. 

The upsides are many – you can be altruistic and create bridges and other structures, you can plant trees or cut them down, you can grow whatever fruits you like (assuming you can find other fruits than your native ones), and you can either sell or donate the animals you catch. After donating one to the museum, the scientific community is satisfied, and you may do what you will with other specimens. You can also collect fine art and donate that to the museum, but some of it could be fake – so you should do a little research before buying. 

The game is a model of progress and knowledge that is right at home pre-19th century, that of the collection, or the table. You collect various insects and fish and account for them by placing them in the museum. 

So what kind of game is Animal Crossing? I’m still thinking about this. Perhaps it’s its own genre of game. Is it even really a game? I guess there are conditions for play – rules and such. There are limits. But you are free to move around in those limits and do what you like. You are pushed toward pursuing the satisfaction of the neighbors, the museum, and your own desires to buy and display particular sets of furniture. Is this really capitalist? Or does it just naturalize forms of exchange and knowledge as part of the basis of setting out to develop a new community? Or perhaps, is it a fantasy of control – where all the decisions are yours and the stakes are low – so that we can stay somewhat together in the larger world of exchange, accumulation, and community. Perhaps there’s another level, where games teach us that the rules don’t have to be a certain way, and very much like some sort of Frankfurt School theory of resistance, we recognize what we don’t have when we step away from Animal Crossing and enter our daily lives, hungry for change.