When Animal Crossing: New Horizons It was released in March, a few weeks after the pandemic was still in progress, many found the game to be a soothing balm, a microcosm of peace and calm during the diverse and abundant turmoil of 2020. A record number of us have taken our little digital islands to live indirectly through cartoon avatars of ourselves, looking for a respite from our real lives.
Ironic, then, that New Horizons It seems tailor-made to reflect on the banalities of the nightmare that is human (and anthropomorphic) existence.
The appeal of the game is undoubtedly its simplicity. Catch and mince and dig and sell and catch and mince and dig and sell. The endless replay of the game is relaxing in a way, almost meditative, at first, anyway. Eventually, these adorable tasks can and will become … well, tasks. The allure of chasing butterflies will become compulsion and then, inevitably, resentment.
Doing the same thing over and over again, after all, is both the apocryphal definition of insanity and real punishment in classical Greek mythology. And this repetition is the core of New Horizons – Every day begins when you walk out the front door, regardless of where you ended up the night before. Each week brings the same visitors, reciting the same lines; the same four fossils buried somewhere in the same patches of earth. Their Groundhog day, if nothing has changed.
Of course, it could be argued that all video games fall prey to meaningless repetition eventually, but New Horizons makes it a feature, not a bug. You pull weeds and clutter your house. The end. In other games, grinding is a means to an end, or perhaps a reward for beating the game, the freedom to exist as a metaphor to save the world.
But in New Horizons, blind consumption is the narrative arc.
The closest thing to an ending is getting a five-star rating for your island, a goal that can only be accomplished by filling the island with stuff. (Fences, especially if Isabelle gets away with it.) The same goes for obtaining a gold trophy from the Happy Home Academy. “Having things” is the only true measure of success.
And there is no abstention: random objects literally fall from the sky or trees, to be saved or sold, forcing the player to the closed system of the island’s capitalist dystopia. There are a finite amount of items to own and finite animals to catch; Sooner or later, to borrow the motto from another game, catch them all. The same products run through Nook’s Cranny, the same clothes at the Able Sisters tailor shop. And none of them really does anything, there are no statistics for goose, they are purchases, and that’s all.
I can wear a sequined blazer and pretend to be a comedian or a Viking in my helmet and boots, but nothing really changes. My main task remains to collect shells and unearth fossils, regardless of any profession I may pretend. I can never be more than a cog in Tom Nook’s corporate machine.
Because honestly, there are no wins. Once you reach a five-star island, there is nowhere to go. And you still do it. You reach your goals, and then … what? Credits do not accumulate, that happens before, in the “middle” of the game, after luring KK Slider to your island. You can’t even celebrate like you do when completing a bridge or ramp. Isabelle congratulates you and gives you a recipe for a golden watering can, an article that you must then build. You have to keep playing to get your gift.
You are not allowed to stop. You can never stop.
But you can at least leave your island, right? Incorrect. The mysterious islands are, almost without fail, the same as yours: the same flowers, the same fruits. You are excited by one, even a little different, an apple or a peach, a new type to plant and start like all the others. Visiting the islands of friends requires coordination, and they are actually more of the same, only occasionally in different colors. Because even traveling in New Horizons It is empty, an illusion.
Neighbors seem to be the exception: they move to their island in search of an adventure, then they move away to continue that search elsewhere. But that option is firmly in your hands: You have to decide whether to let these digital friends live their lives or stay solely for your selfish pleasure. They don’t really care. But it does.
Keeping a neighbor brings guilt; You have ruined his dreams. Letting them go, meanwhile, brings you all the existential boredom. Because when they leave, they talk about how excited they are about all the new things they will see and experience, things they will never see. Because you’re trapped on that island, forced to see all your loved ones leave you, like Asimov’s Bicentennial manor Jeff Winger during Yahoo! season Community.
The only thing that makes life worth living, The good place Once discussed, it ends. But this game will never end. Tom Nook will never stop. Even time itself doesn’t make sense here.
This is, of course, just the tip of the metaphysical iceberg. What does it mean that hamsters can be owned as pets and visited as neighbors? I apologize to the ladybugs and hermit crabs, which implies that they have a certain appearance of autonomy, and yet I catch them, I continue to sell them, to infinity. And what exactly is our relationship with our digital avatars? Are they characters? Or am I testing a version of myself? Am I in this game? Is this game my life?
Than, Animal Crossing: New Horizons seems to be asking even it is lifetime?
Or maybe it’s just fun fun and I need to call my therapist more often. Honestly, it looks like it could go either way.
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