My Mixed Feelings about Animal Crossing
Since sheltering at home, I’ve developed the urge to buy a Switch. I have a lot more flexibility with my time now, and “Animal Crossing: New Horizons” just came out. Seeing everyone playing New Horizons online makes me want to get back into one of the games I grew up playing. In classic Animal Crossing fashion, my brothers and I bought the GameCube version at a flea market when I was about twelve or thirteen. The rest of that summer, I’d wake up every morning and play Animal Crossing. I named the town Atown (Rover asked what the town was called and all I could think of was ‘a town’), and the four of us all got houses, payed off our debts, filled the museum, and just kind of wandered around catching fish, bugs, and doing chores for our villagers. And from everything I hear, New Horizons is everything the old game was and more.
But I just can’t bring myself to buy a Switch so I can play New Horizons. Firstly, it’s not my wisest financial decision. More importantly, I can’t justify the time spent playing Animal Crossing to myself. Admittedly, I like open ended, sandbox type video games. Growing up, two of the video games I spent the most time playing were Harvest Moon 64, which has the very loose goal of improving your farm, and Animal Crossing, which has the somehow looser goal of paying off your debt to Tom Nook. Lots of games incentivise you to make progress in a main plot, but not Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing. They place you in a world and allow you to do whatever you want there.
These days I don’t play video games all that much. In the past I played a lot of Stardew Valley (basically a new version of Harvest Moon 64) but I don’t play it now because (as I’ve said here) I don’t like how it lures me into a nostalgic hope for a simple past that cannot be the future. I want to justify playing Animal Crossing to myself because New Horizons looks fun. I want to say that New Horizons could give me a way to connect with my brothers. But only one of them has a Switch, and doing everything online just won’t feel the same as racing each other to the GameCube every morning. Maybe I want to say that Animal Crossing gives me a new parallel world with its own schedule and rhythm that I can slip into when my present life lacks schedule and rhythm. But my life doesn’t lack schedule and rhythm. I’m not a high-schooler at home over the summer anymore. I have work, and (as I talk about here) the Church Calendar and liturgy to give me structure even in the absence of consistent work. So, I can’t use that to justify Animal Crossing to myself either.
Even though I can’t justify buying Animal Crossing to myself, I still want to play it. Is having fun a good enough reason to do something? I like that in the world of Animal Crossing the answer to this question is yes, that is more than enough justification. Fishing is fun. Sure, you can get money from fishing or donate new specimens to the museum, but it’s fun even when those aren’t motivating factors. So I fish. Walking through the trees on a long summer evening listening to the drone of cicadas, holding my bug catching net on my shoulder, looking for stag beetles is fun. So I do it. Decking out my house to look like my neighbor Bob the Cat’s house is fun. Listening to KK Slider at the train station is fun. And the world of Animal Crossing is generous. Tom Nook gets a lot of criticism for immediately launching the player into debt, but I wish my own debt was owned by Tom Nook. There’s no interest, and there’s no deadlines. So fun can be all the justification that I need for life. I don’t need to be ruthlessly efficient because of the liberality of life in the Animal Crossing village.
Intellectually, I think our dedication to efficiency is a scourge. Being totally committed to efficiency undervalues people. It flattens us from real humans to just inputs and outputs, and takes the outputs as a real measure of our worth. We abandon the elderly, the poor, and the ill because they don’t produce and thus worthless. Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign was refreshing because his vision for the country doesn’t rely on efficiency and production as its main metric of utility. Yet, facing Animal Crossing: New Horizons makes me question my conviction. It seems like I don’t practically believe that for myself.
I don’t really do anything for the sake of it just being fun. I have a lot of fun doing the things that I do, but if I’m choosing between things that I think are going to be fun or something I think is going to be helpful or useful to me, I’m going to go with the latter. I read a lot of books that are fun, and a lot that are no fun but I feel like they make me a better person. They serve a function in my life. I do a lot of work that isn’t fun, but it serves a purpose in my life. I go on walks but I don’t do them for fun, I do it for exercise. Most of these articles are fun to write, but I do it to improve my writing and get some point across. I remember a concert that I went to and a friend asked me what I thought. I said it was fun, but I wanted it to be more than just fun. I thought the artist had a message that would have really hit home at the venue. But the artist did say any of that. Instead the concert was just fun.
Animal Crossing is pointless, but it’s fun. Maybe that’s what I need. I don’t want my life to be totally focused on maximizing my efficiency or learning. I don’t think that attitude is good for me or for us as a whole, but that’s what I end up doing anyway. At this point in my life, it feels like I can’t just do things for fun. So maybe I need Animal Crossing. But not as a reminder that it’s okay for things to be fun and non-optimized. That would be giving it a purpose. I’d be using Animal Crossing to teach myself a lesson and become a “better person.” Maybe in my life that’s built for production and value, I need Animal Crossing just to be pointless, but fun, and to be okay with that being my only justification.
