April 25, 2020
Photo Credit to Nintendo
At eight o’clock in the morning, Fengguang Chen boarded the crowded carriage of subway line 5 in Beijing, China. There weren’t many people in the carriage because of the COVID-19 pandemic, so he found a seat. The train set off. Chen carefully took out his Nintendo Switch from his backpack and put his headphone on. Chen decided to enjoy his one-hour immersive adventure in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the hit live simulation video game developed by Nintendo.
Chen launched the game and checked the tulips he was growing. Then Portia, a Dalmatian that lived on his digital island, came to him. A purple bubble around Portia told Chen she had something to say to him. Chen clicked the bubble, and a message box popped up: “Do you like to live a stable or challenging life?”
When Chen continued to make conversation with Portia by clicking buttons, he realized Portia, a virtual islander in his “kingdom,” had decided to move off the island. That touched Chen because he himself moved to Beijing from his hometown in the south two years ago to strive for his dream life.
“This is an insightful question, and a choice that many people may face in the real world,” Chen said. Finally, he decided to respect Portia’s choice to leave the island and seek a different life - just like himself.
Portia is only one of the nine non-player character residents, or NPCs, who lived on Chen’s island. In the game Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the players each own their own island, where they can create everything.
Chen is an avid Nintendo player and video game fan. He bought his first Nintendo console, a 3DS II, during college. Chen started to play Animal Crossing in 2012 when the fourth game in the series, “New Leaf” went online. New Horizons is the series’ fifth game. It launched on March 20, 2020 — a week after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. New Horizons has quickly attracted players all around the world and become the biggest hit video game among all age groups.
According to NPD, an American market-research company, Nintendo Switch doubled its sales in March 2020 compared with a year ago, breaking the Nintendo monthly sales record. Switch become Nintendo’s best-selling product, surpassing Nintendo DS in 2010. Animal Crossing: New Horizons becomes the best-selling Animal Crossing game in the U.S. - in the first month it had already surpassed the total sales (across all time) of each previous series.
The Nintendo video game has never become a phenomenon like it is now. The coronavirus pandemic and social distancing appear to be a factor that contributes to New Horizons’ success. People get more leisure time, and less choice to pass the time. Mentally, they have never been more eager to find a place to get rid of the harsh reality, where the number of COVID-19 infected cases surges every day.
The game is like a peaceful version of any simulation role-playing game. Chen compared Animal Crossing to Harvest Moon, and said the best part of it is that it has a built-in time system. This means in the world of Animal Crossing, one day is as long as one day in the real world. Because of this, players have to wait long enough to get the daily bonus - no way to cheat. It does better in creating a parallel world than other simulation games.
Chen most enjoys communicating with the islanders. Sometimes Chen has to mediate a conflict between two islanders just because they disagree with each others’ body-building methods. If he gave a costume to one of his islanders, he would find out that this happy islander would wear this costume every day, or collect it as a curiosity.
All the reaction and context in the game follows an inner logic. No wonder there are catalogs made by fans that summarize the characteristics of each islander so that players can get along with them more harmoniously. “When I’m communicating with the NPCs, it doesn’t feel like communicating with the program, but with souls with thought and emotion,” Chen said.
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Photo by Cici Sun
If part of the fun of the game for players is to develop the “inherent value” by interacting with the pre-designed characters, then another part must be to create something new.
Cici Sun was standing in front of her clothes wall, where she had hanged two printing gowns and matching hats, a pink-and-white long-sleeved dress, a hemline-decorated red Lolita costume, a Chanel classic black skirt suit, and a Louis Vuitton oversize T-shirt with a monogrammed hat. She put on the oversize T-shirt and the monogram hat - by clicking the button on Switch.
Cici’s virtual character has black hair up to her shoulders, pointed eyes, and tanned skin. “For my hairstyle and face, I chose something close to what they really are. But for the skin color, I always wanted to get my skin tanned, and now I’m realizing this dream in Animal Crossing,” she said.
When I called Cici Sun by Zoom, she sat comfortably in the coach in her one-bed, one-bath apartment in Vancouver. She is an undergraduate majoring in illustration. After her university began remote learning methods, she had much more spare time than before.
Cici has a Wechat group of six close girlfriends of hers. When they all started to play Animal Crossing, Cici couldn’t help but join them as soon as possible. So she spent 1,300 Chinese yuan (about $185 U.S.) on a used Switch Lite, which is the smaller and lighter version of Switch.
To many girls, possessing objects that others don’t have is appealing, and Animal Crossing’s design style on characters and scenes are definitely attractive to many: cartoon, low saturation color, and Japan’s “Kawaii” (かわいい ) style.
Before I interviewed anyone, the first thing that attracted me about this game is the clothing design. Besides players like Cici, who reproduce the clothes from high-end fashion brands, I have seen fashion-catching players wearing exquisite, colorful kimonos, wool jackets with high school uniforms, or striping cardigans and mini-skirts. Cosplayers have discovered the best way to customize Harry Porter’s house outfit, and fanciers of Lolita culture create amazing Lolita dresses with intricate lace and bowknots.
Cici told me how the clothing design in Animal Crossing works: first, choose the basic article from the category, choose a color on the palate, and fill the mosaic pixels where you want. The steps sound simple, but to actually work through them took hours of hard work. “Hours and hours’ painting on the small screen is really bad for eyes,” Cici complained about this sweet trouble.
Besides clothes, creating the architecture and landscapes on the island is also a way for your imagination to run. I’ve seen a Korean player establish an entire summer festival market in the center of her island, where Japanese-style snacks and handiwork stalls stand shoulder by shoulder on a cobblestone path. It’s almost a miniature of the Mitama Matsuri night market in Tokyo. The salty smell of the sea, girls’ slenderized silhouettes in yukata, and the brightness of fireworks immediately emerge in my mind. That was when I realized how far our imagination could take us, comparing with the lifestyle under stay-at-home orders due to the pandemic.
In Cici’s Wechat group, one of the members is now in China, while the others are in Vancouver, but none of them have met each other since the lockdown. With Animal Crossing, they usually meet on one person’s island, where resources are most abundant or where turnips have the best price. Then they exchange seeds of fruit trees, take photos with the sunset, or do nothing but hang around - just like a normal girls’ date.
Cici agreed that the epidemic of Animal Crossing: New Horizons was partially a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Everyone was so bored with staying at home and desperate for some outdoor activities,” Cici said, “My friend and I once made a prediction that the day when the pandemic lockdown ends, none of us will play this game again.”
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Just like Cici, a lot of people see Animal Crossing as a way to virtually interact during the pandemic.
April 22 was Riley Rudd’s 20th birthday. He launched Animal Crossing because one of his friends invited him to her island to have a look at the mushroom forest she has been building. But when he arrived, he saw a narrow path blocked by wooden screens and green ground lights. He followed the path while he was thinking, “It was not the intent of me going to her island.”
The screens led him to an arched door before he stepped on sand. Candles, lavenders, and rare black roses decorated a beach. Riley began to run. On the horizon soon appeared another arched door, where he saw all his friends standing. They were each wearing a halo and a uniformed indigo dress and started to light party poppers and say “happy birthday” as Riley passed the door. Fifteen seconds of poppers’ explosions and shimmering sound effects, accompanied by regular ocean tide, left Riley speechless. “OMGGG I’m dead,” Riley typed.
Riley’s friends also presented birthday cake, cupcakes, coconuts, and wine for him on a round table, while the balloons and ribbons decorated a whiteboard that read “happy birthday.” There were even instruments: piano, saxophone, and cello. It was night, and little shining creatures appeared on the sand, and an astronomical telescope was put towards the full moon. How could the moon be so low and bright if it was not in a world of fantasy?
Riley, a marketing and design student in New Jersey, started to play Animal Crossing: New Horizons on March 20, and soon became obsessed with it. Due to the quarantine, he was able to spend five to eight hours a day on Animal Crossing.
The game has become Riley’s business. Riley owns an Etsy business that sells posters he designed, and recently he started selling Animal Crossing art crafts: $5 for a tile path that has a costumed name on it, $15.50 for character commission. He also made friends through the game. Those who surprised him on April 22 were his newly made Animal Crossing friends. They knew each other on Twitter because of New Horizons and found out some of them live really close by. “After quarantine, those of us who live near each other are planning on meeting up,” Riley said.
In addition to birthday parties, players also choose Animal Crossing: New Horizons as their gathering place for wedding ceremonies, anniversaries, and protests. This function of the game is beyond the developers’ expectations. They could never imagine that the virtual networking of this non-competitive game would compensate for what the reality took away from people - the freedom to meet each other in person.
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Video by Manhui Wu
It was the third morning that Pu Park had spent by the clifftop river trying to catch a Stringfish, and still no result. Park had already made his mind to start all over with the Stringfish next year, as their seasonality was going to end in no more than two or three days.
The Stringfish is one of the rarest fish in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, worth a reward of 15,000 Bells in the game. Park built a three-level waterfall because he was told Stringfish can only be found in elevated streams from 4 pm to 9 am.
It was nearly 9 in the morning, and then Park saw a big shadow in the water. Would it be a Stringfish? His heart started to beat fast. He coiled the fishing line, and when he could clearly see the harvest, he was wild with joy - it was a Stringfish in his hand!
Every day after Pu Park, a 38-year-old white-collar worker in a media corporation, got home from work, he would play Animal Crossing: New Horizons for four hours. He collected bugs, did some fishing, and grew some trees. “Playing this game makes me feel I’m young again,” Park said.
The games Park used to play before New Horizons were limited to SameGame and other simple games on smartphones. But he praised Animal Crossing: New Horizons as an idyllic pastoral in modern life. “People can realize their dreams that they can’t achieve in the real world,” Park said. “They create an ideal world, a utopia.”
Park doesn’t do a lot of outdoor activities in the real world, but he does in the virtual world; Park has never had a chance to buy a house in the real world, but in New Horizons, he gets this chance. I started to feel that the game brings possibilities to one’s limited, fixed life.
Another New Horizons player, Manhui Wu, showed me her amazing showroom on the island - 10 outfits, including costumes of Disney princesses from Snow White to Aurora, and colorful Lolita dresses. “In the real world, it would be stupid to dress like that, but on my island, I can dress in whatever I like.”
Wu is a communications student at New York University, and she loves to go to Disneyland and collect Disney toys. She told me her ultimate goal in this game is to make her island into Disneyland. “I have a sand painting of Duffy (a Disney character) on my beach,” Wu said.
Animal Crossing and all simulation games are an outcome and experimental result of postmodern technology progress. Players can ignore the restrictions from reality and be a better or different person in those games.
When I found that people can buy 6 million Bells, the virtual currency in Animal Crossing, with $9.99 U.S., I knew the scene in Ready Player One is not just a fantasy. I wouldn’t be surprised if people use the resources in the real world in exchange for the resources in the game. The boundary is diminishing. The simulation games, when a certain amount of players are so immersed in it, become hyperreality, or simulacrum, from which people find it hard to distinguish reality.
I do understand why Cici bought a used Switch in order to join the gaming clique - I nearly feel I’m left behind when it seems everyone in social media is talking about Animal Crossing. But the fever leads to a seller’s market. A basic console normally costs you $299, but as of April 24, the prices on eBay, Amazon, and Price Wack all exceed $500. Even the cheapest used one would cost $300. That’s why I gave up.
Luckily, the fever will pass, but for those who try to build a wonderland in the game, Animal Crossing is a great way to deal with the failure of dreams.
