Animal Crossing: The polite battleground for gaming's soul
There’s a screen in the Switch interface that tells me I’ve played Animal Crossing: New Horizons for almost 200 hours. That feels by far the longest I’ve ever spent with a single game – though perhaps Fortnite might tell me otherwise. The weird thing is, with New Horizons, it really doesn’t feel like I’ve spent 200 hours with it. Maybe the time has flown by. Maybe. It’s more that my interactions with the game feel, even now, relentlessly superficial.
Animal Crossing is a lovely game about moving to a town filled with animals and then swapping furniture with them. That’s the basics of it, I guess. New Horizons shifts this to an island setting, but it’s the same deal. And yet within this simple set-up – almost a doll’s house really – it can feel like a huge battle is taking place. A battle at the heart of video games. A battle between earning and being. Gosh, that sounded pretentious. Apologies. (For more on this distinction please see Edwin’s infinitely more thoughtful piece on the subject.)
But seriously. My purest memories of Animal Crossing probably go back to the GameCube. That first game, bought on import, played via a disk you had to put in first that allowed you to play import games, was a marvel. My friend and I didn’t know what we were getting into. Then, as any Animal Crossing player will recognise, we started to worry that the ground was dropping away forever. This tiny game that could be played straight from GameCube’s memory it was so snug, seemed to contain horrifying depths. The furniture went on forever. Wingback chairs all the way to the bottom.
Even then there were two Animal Crossings. The let’s go for a walk and see what happens Animal Crossing, and the God, I need one more armchair to complete the set Animal Crossing. The first Animal Crossing was infinitely the better game. Those first moments were magic. I have written about this before but the first time you plant a fruit in Animal Crossing, the first time you clock in at night and it’s night in the game, warm light glowing in every house you pass – these moments are properly priceless. You cannot put a value on them. The first time I met Wisp! The first time I saw fireworks reflected in the pond.
But they were surrounded by things you could put a price on. Collecting furniture sets. Getting the house and the wardrobe just so. Making your villagers as happy as they could be, arranging – always a bit creepy this – for the cast of villagers you most wanted. This game is not very good, I would argue. (Good in the way of the Lévi-Strauss formula for good food: good to eat, good to think.) But it is compelling. My feeling back in the day was that Animal Crossing was testing you. I always felt it was asking me to reject this second game and find the beauty in the first. Yes, you can spend your afternoon with the Argos catalogue (RIP), but wouldn’t you rather go outside?
