A break from reality with digital animals
This past weekend, I was stung by a swarm of digital wasps — my digital eye is still swollen. This was Sunday night, after I’d spent most of the day selling digital apples and helping some digital neighbors furnish their digital homes.
The world is split roughly into two populations: Those who find leading an imaginary life on a desert island and making friends with unfailingly sweet anthropomorphic animals to be an exciting and comforting pursuit, and those who think that sounds about as interesting as waiting in line at the DMV.
For a long time I thought I was the latter. I was wrong. I’m now fully devoted to “Animal Crossing: New Horizons,” the latest Nintendo Switch craze, and my life on Blueways Island (You get to pick the name).
“Animal Crossing” doesn’t have much in the way of a point. You spend your days planting flowers, gathering specimens for an owl that is also the director of the local museum. You collect wood and ore to help open a corner store. You complete tasks to earn money, and then you buy digital decorations for your home. Here’s how Nintendo describes it: “Create a home, interact with cute animal villagers, and just enjoy life.”
This, it turns out, is a recipe for runaway success. Nintendo released the title on March 20, and already it’s one of Japan’s alltime bestselling video games.
This is hardly the first mainstream worldbuilding game (“Sims,” anyone?), and it’s not even the first “Animal Crossing” title (it’s actually the fifth). But the game’s release comes at a time when we all desperately need a little escape from the everevolving news and anxiety about the coronavirus pandemic.
There’s something utterly relaxing about the game’s slow progression. And there’s something about living a simple life in a lush world where there is no coronavirus and no Twitter. I collect weeds to sell to raccoons that are always very grateful for my work. I plant flowers and water them and hope they’ll crosspollinate. I go to other islands and bring their flora and fauna back to my own.
Already I’ve persuaded another friend to buy the game. She, too, was quickly hooked and now so is her wife, Cristina Watson.
“Right now, going to the store is complicated. Going for a walk is complicated,” Watson said. “’Animal Crossing’ is the one place where you can let your guard down a little bit and uncomplicatedly complete the mundane tasks of existing, which suddenly don’t seem mundane anymore.”
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Watson passes her days shooting down balloons with her slingshot and fishing in her island’s rivers. Sometimes, she’ll sit by the water and gaze at a moon made of pixels.
As with most anything, the experience can be as deep as you want it to be. Maybe it’s enough that it’s just cute or that it feels positive to the point of absurdity.
Or, like Soleil Ho, The San Francisco Chronicle’s restaurant critic, you might find yourself deconstructing the inherent capitalistic overtones of stripping a virgin island of natural resources — and then push past all that to contemplate aesthetics.
“What I actually enjoy about it,” she said, “is how, in the process of trying to make my own island beautiful, I have opportunities to step back and wonder, from where do my conceptions of beauty, of order, actually originate?”
I haven’t gone quite that deep with it yet. Right now I’m still delighting in organizing digital furniture in my new digital home and watching digital cherry blossoms ride a digital wind.
The experience can be as deep as you want it to be. Maybe it’s enough that it’s just cute or that it feels positive to the point of absurdity.