The Quiet Revolution of Animal Crossing
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
1) a player performs some sort of input into a game
2) the game responds with some sort of audiovisual phenomena in regards to that input
3) 1 and 2 are repeated, creating a relationship between the player and the game
I know a lot of people define video games as a series of choices or "states", but I think it's too strict as I don't think the appeal of video games is necessarily reduced to "a series of interesting decisions" as Will Wright puts it. I do think decision-making is a big part of a lot of games, but it doesn't explain the entertainment of situations like Revolver Ocelot torturing Snake in Metal Gear Solid, or groups of teenagers playing an easy Starcraft map against a computer player together. Animal Crossing is the same way too; the relationship the player has with the product is fulfilling, and that's what drives its appeal.
Laying on the grass and seeing shapes in clouds is also “pointless” but it’s not invaluable.
invaluable (adjective): extremely useful
The prefix "in" of "invaluable" does mean negation but it means negation in the way that the value of the object is such that it doesn't exist. It's so valuable that you cannot even quantify it, it transcends the notion of value.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/invaluable#note-1
In this case the context makes the meaning clear, but this quirk of English has confused people for years.
Not without value. :)
I'm not even being 100% facile—I used to think about this on the way home from Bart before I stopped taking Bart thanks to the quarantine.
There are MANY types of games and they provide different types of pleasure.
For example multiplayer games usually bring pleasure through cooperation, socializing, and becoming better.
sandbox games like minecraft can provide pleasure through creation.
other video games like the last of us are just deeply emotional and touching through story telling
etc.
1) a player performs some sort of input into a game
2) the game responds with some sort of audiovisual phenomena in regards to that input
3) 1 and 2 are repeated, creating a relationship between the player and the game
But in games like AC, you control everything. So it's sort of like a child of abuse developing OCD or some other neurological disorder. It's a coping mechanism. Maybe there's something to that?
He says a useful model is that if the game has no goal, it's better termed a "toy" (like Lego); if it doesn't give you "agency", it's an "event" (like watching a film); if it doesn't have mechanics that restrict what's possible, it's an "activity" (like jogging); and if it has real-world relevance, it's "life".
I haven't played Animal Crossing and don't know where it falls on those spectra.
You have agency - there's no penalty for not expanding your house or visiting other islands, etc.
The mechanics do restrict what's possible but then I can't think of a game (except perhaps Dwarf Fortress or real-life RPGs) where they don't.
And there's very little real-world relevance beyond, I suppose, "don't be a dick and life is easier for everyone."
Thanks to Zuckerberg & Co collecting more data in a day about behavior, than Psychologists and Sociologists have done through their lifetimes what is becoming obvious is there is a very WIDE distribution of all kinds of Psychological Traits, Needs and dozen other factors in any population. And they aren't static but dynamic like electric and magnetic fields. Not just 2 fields interacting but 20 or something.
Creative people are able to connect with some subset and produce group behavior that are not always reproducible because the Maxwells Equations of Psychology and Sociology haven't yet been discovered.
Looking at what other people have posted "paying off your house" or "filling the museum" in Animal Crossing are more like achievements that you can perform but they aren't necessarily a win condition.
A similar game that is more of a toy than really a game is the Stanley Parable. Sure you can get the Achievements in it but there is no real win condition at all. It doesn't even penalize you for not doing a task and instead figuring out the endings is what makes it fun.
A "video game" is not the same as a game.
You can have definitions of games, toys, events, etc, but "video game" encompasses all of them.
Once it's digital and has some kind of interactivity, the only thing that matters is whether the author has defined it as a "video game". That's it.
Or maybe to be more short, I think it might be good to be a bit less prescriptive of what qualifies as a video game, as we otherwise will blind ourselves to why people enjoy them as entertainment, competition, or self-expression.
I think that was Sid Meier.
Here is Sid talking about that quote in 2012 (apparently he first said it in 1989) https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015756/Interesting
In academia many end up going back to Huizinga's "magic circle" [0] which he was writing about in the 1930's, before any video games were around(although many immediate mechanical precessors were in evidence like pinball and slot machines).
From the perspective of a game creator or player, what tends to be of primary importance is the information conveyed through the game, which can be primarily aesthetic(a pretty picture) or deal with specific themes and principles. In this light, introducing the magic circle is of some importance because of its clarifying property: the information is exploring these concepts, and not some others that you might be interested in.
And so it goes with many opinions about games, too: if it doesn't cover the topics they want in they way they like, players reject the game. Some players need to see violence and power struggle, others need cozy reassurance.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_circle_(virtual_worlds...
In other words: Action from the player delivers result from the game, giving the player a sense of satisfaction.
And that's the point. There is a direct correlation between action and satisfaction. The more challenging and complex your action is, the higher can be the satisfaction when you finally get a good result.
And that's why people see Animal Crossing as kinda pointless, because everything is so simple, there is no complexity in action, thus no high satisfaction as direct response. Instead there is the very long game, where you do many many small actions over a rather long time to gain some rather small or middle sized result, while you have many many more mechanisms where the result is simple just random.
For people who are fixed on shortterm direct satisfaction, this is bad, because it's a slow longterm process with little outcome. It's basically like an extrem-sportler who needs to find the joy in just walking through the park.
But at the same time, the game is extremely relaxing. The music, the ambiance, the story, all make you rest. And that's the goal of the game.
--
Anyway, I question the connection between complexity of action and satisfaction. Take rhythm games. Yes, many people play them for mastery, but a common (perhaps more common) way of playing is just to enjoy your rhythmic jumping/button pressing/hand waving to the beat with some fancy audiovisuals also synced to the rhythm. There's near zero complexity here. But what matters is the state of flow you achieve, it becomes an emotion pump.
As far as I know it can become quite complex and deep. More complex than Animal Crossing.
> But at the same time, the game is extremely relaxing. The music, the ambiance, the story, all make you rest. And that's the goal of the game.
I thought the goal is building up your farm and collecting all the bundles and achivments? I guess at the end the goal depends on the player. Which is the point, whether it's pointless depends on the satisfaction the player gains from playing.
> There's near zero complexity here.
I find them quite challenging. Yes, from the mechanical point they are simple, but execution-level is still rather high depending on your personal skill.
Animal Crossing is similar. For a kid it might be challenging enough to do all those stuff and things, for a teenager or adult, it's just braindead dialog-clicking with no challenge in excecution at all. The satisfaction comes over time.
But this assertion is just not true. Simple actions can be very rewarding and give a lot of satisfaction. And that's exactly what you can get in Animal Crossing.
I think some people see Animal Crossing as pointless because they don't find much value in expressing themselves through the game. I think Minecraft is a similar example of this, as some people mostly focus on fighting monsters or getting gear, as compared to building a house they like the look of.
It's basically an addiction-based dark pattern. The game punishes you for not playing. I play games on MY TIME, and I won't make myself slave to one.
To me Animal Crossing is a game that you play over many months to sometimes relax doing something mindless or over the longer term to have an island and house that you slowly build up in your own way.
With that in mind there are a lot of great things in animal crossing. A lot of the furniture has interesting interactions and the museum is just a beautiful thing to walk through.
But I also feel that some aspects of the game needs tweaking as they detract from the gameplay. There's no reason I should have to craft fishbait one by one, mindlessly spamming A for minutes at a time. Nor does shopping have to be as tedious as it is. There is no reason I should have to buy flowers in batches of 5 taking 5+ seconds per batch. I want to plant a massive flower patch not navigate overly deep menus. The lest said about the online play the better.
I think the author is trying to find meaning where there really isn't any. At its core Animal Crossing is shallow, but in some sense that lack of depth is the appeal. What it has is a shocking breadth though giving each player lots of options to express themselves or simply to while away a few peaceful hours.
It's not for everyone and it doesn't have to be.
In AC you collect stuff and arange/design stuff. And you also build stuff, for collecting and arranging stuff.
In SV you Farm, literally, and you plan how you farm the most efficiently way. You even have a energy-system and limited time, and have permanent pressure to do things now and not later. You can do build things, but AFAIK only for farming.
Both also have other mechanisms, often the same as in the respectively other game, but in some significant lesser complexity.
I have not played SV, but I have been a farmer. I find it fascinating that the game makers managed to get that mechanic into the game, because that is 100% farming. "When it's time to make hay, make hay" is a saying you hear almost every day as a full time farmer. If you don't get it done today, it may rain tomorrow and then everything will be ruined, is the sentiment there.
I don't know that there's anything else to this, or that it's really that interesting. But I find it interesting that game creators, who I assume were never farmers, would work that into a game that seems to focus on farming. The stereotype of a farmer, from what I can tell post-farm life, is to be laid back and sort of let life happen around them.
Heh, Nintendo is simply incapable or unwilling to produce a quality online experience. I don't know why.
They created a masterpiece with Smash Ultimate but then did a huge disservice to themselves and the game by slapping on a really shitty online mode. Obviously it doesn't impact sales and that's likely what drives their decisions, but it's still so disappointing.
Given the nature of the game I don't understand why they didn't prioritize fun over protecting against duping.
That's nevermind the fact that two friends can't do stuff like terraform or furnish an island together.
I suspect they may be aiming for long-term fun over instant gratification. Hard to get items will inevitably have a story attached of how they were a acquired. That means asking about some new thing you see when visiting a friend will get them telling that story. If Nintendo can keep these stories interesting, it’s a compelling reason for people to keep visiting friends in-game.
On the other hand, if item duplication is possible, that destroys rarity, and most items will have no meaningful history to speak of.
This can happen for something as benign as a player taking a lunch break and not babying their switch.
Which harms the long term experience as if it happens to you once, it makes you paranoid about taking a longer term trip to a friend's island and doing something other than a short tour.
[1] https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/social/question...
On the other side, Nintendo is also a very old company, with a long history and sight on longterm-goals. But it seems to be also full of now older people with not so much experience in modern things. Addtionally, it's japan, which has a very bad history with stuff like Personal Computers and online-services. So people at nintendo are simply lacking experience and knowledge there even more than anywhere else.
This environment seems to be resulting in this very slow growing gain of understanding the world of online-gaming-features, as also mobile devices. It's step by step, with each step taking years, where others already had started a decade earlier.
I mean I spent a lot of time in Runescape, hours upon hours spent clicking on the water to fish, or running between the same five rocks together with some other players to mine and slowly watch that mining level number go up.
Then there's MMO's that if you look at it for a minute it can be really intense and visually interesting, but when you zoom out it turns I've run this same dungeon dozens of times already just to get a hundred or so tokens, of which I need 800-or-so to buy a piece of equipment that raises my stats by a few points.
Arguably collecting the clams is much much more time consuming, and it's always been something I'm fine with. It's engaging running around digging the claims up.
Crafting them literally is just me spamming A for minutes at the time. It makes me watch a YouTube video instead of engaging with the game.
When you need multiples to even have fishbait have a point, then I feel it detracts from the game. I literally can't think of an experience (min max or no) that is enhanced by the crafting tedium. It would be different if crafting involved some care and attention like say Fantasy Life.
My problem isn't the time wasting it's the fact that the way the time is wasted is not engaging at all. When I think about that minutes of crafting, I don't even want to spend the hour collecting clams and the hour fishing a certain spot for that rare fish I'm missing.
I find it really difficulty to explain just how much I am impressed with the Museum. It's so meticulously designed, and so calming. The level of detail that went into it so so impressive - each bug, fish, or fossil has their place and path. Little cute nooks and places to take pics in. It's really cool.
This is part of the reversal of the great ‘Opening of China’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_economic_reform
Also till recently gaming consoles themselves weren't available in China as well.
I wouldn't have bought it on my own, but having just one child and the quarantine I'm thankful that it exists.
Stay strong my friend.
I love AC, but I have other itches that need scratches.
What it does do well is an incredible level of polish in the production side of the game and giving the player a real and fulfilling sense of progression.
Adding a "weight" to repetitive actions has been a controversial game design principle. It implicitly makes good/efficient actions more rewarding, but there has to be a balance.
I stumbled upon this article a while ago which attempts to argue that former idea to absurdity, it's very well written. I disagree with almost the whole thing, but it was fun to see someone disconnect themselves so far from the simple, real time engagement of a playing a video game. It's an entirely valid way to look at games, but it's just a very shallow view on games as a medium. He even accidentally discovers the real reasons why we play games as he works hard to make his case on the gameplay-as-work idea. Full respect to the author, and I'm sure they knew exactly how contrarian they were being.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/10/dont-...
Some of my favourite quotes:
>"That’s the big problem with video games: To enjoy them, you have to play them."
> "Game-play—the work of working a game—is fundamentally irritating"
> "And like all labor, the best way to get it done is to farm it out to others. Let the memers honk their geese so you don’t have to."
at some level almost all games could be reduced to a version of cookie clicker
good games keep players actively looking for a new meta by tweaking and adding content, similar to the everchanging running of a business
The grind is the least fun part of the game, but also why you keep coming back.
I can think of some interesting counterexamples: in games like Minecraft and Factorio, you create something and are left with an interesting artifact you've designed. In MMOs, you're often left with new friendships.
But I'd be lying if I said I played those games primarily for those outcomes. It feels like each of those games still have some core meat that's shared with cookie clicker, and those other things that come out of it are somehow secondary in my short-term choice to play the game.
You seriously need to expand your pool of games.
While I agree in principle, the rewards in a lot of games isn't only the satisfaction in watching numbers go up (= progress, I guess?), but also an enjoyable game loop (I experienced that with Diablo 3 in which you play through the same content over and over again, but the speed of which you eventually blow through thousands of enemies is gratifying) and an unfolding storyline. I had that best with the old Final Fantasy games, where progress was frequently rewarded with cutscenes and the whole game is mostly a storyline you can follow.
On that note the FFVII Remake is a great game to get into.
Yes, Ian Bogost is a respected game designer and developer.
airport security, consumer debt disaffected workers, pandemic flu tort reform, suburban errands data compression, the petroleum industry, the politics of nutrition food inspection, factory farming fast food franchise economics, chemical bonding, grass-roots outreach
> The goal of the game is to earn "clicks" by clicking on a sprite of a cow every six hours. [...] A premium currency known as "Mooney" allows the user to purchase different cow designs and skip the six-hour interval between clicks.
This doesn't really sound "successful" in the traditional sense.
I'm not sure the "traditional sense" of successful was what he was going for. However, it was successful, nevertheless.
Just Nintendo Fanboy Things
I don't know if I would call Stardew Valley "less well known", as it's sold over 10 million copies. It's incredibly popular, one of the biggest indie game success stories ever.
I would also say Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley (and Harvest Moon, for that matter) and very different types of games (despite surface level similarities), so it's pretty hard to compare them directly like that.
The inequality is legitimate.
It doesn't have to be from a single developer, or even a small dev team, but rather from a team that is in some meaningful sense "independent".
This means, as an interesting example, that Minecraft was at one point about as indie as it is possible to be, and now is about as not-indie as it is possible to be.
(And if you disallowed people visiting another island on the same Switch, people would be up in arms about that too.)
Reviews of Animal Crossing are more a reflection of the author than Animal Crossing itself. The game, like any topic viral enough to drive the engagement economy, is just some bobbet to anchor an opinion around.
For example, in the article I can tell that Bogost uses games to live out his fantasy as a humanities professor. And Lantz enjoys playing the contrarian.
Nothing wrong with that, they are playing the game in their own way, perhaps without even needing to _play_ it.
This strikes me as "blood from a stone".
Generally, games aren't taken as serious art with high brow messages. I don't think Animal Crossing is really trying to 'say' anything. (Albeit, the original one was made when the developer was feeling lonely when he moved to a new town). I think the author is the kind who wants to write lofty things about games.
I think that explains the frustration in the question "Do people find comfort in [this bullshit]?". If you make serious games with serious messages to be taken seriously by serious people, I think something relaxed like Animal Crossing somewhat undermines "games are a serious artform".
It seems ludicrous to judge an artform entirely based on what you consider to be its least-worthy example. It's like seeing an episode of Friends and saying that television shows can't be serious art because they're just strings of cheap jokes or reading some smut and saying that a novel can't be about anything important.
For the record, I'm not entirely clear if the bit I quoted is your opinion or if it's meant to be the opinion of a hypothetical game developer who "make[s] serious games with serious messages to be taken seriously by serious people," but either way it rubs me the wrong way to a) discredit the medium based on a cherry-picked example and b) to claim that AC can't be a serious game or that it can't have a meaningful message because it isn't 'serious' enough.
> I don't think Animal Crossing is really trying to 'say' anything.
Maybe not anything as serious as the article tries to claim, but I think art with a simple, comforting message is just as important as art with a deeper message of social and political criticism. Playing the game makes me happy, which is something that seems to get ignored by the people who don't like it. The 'message' is that I can stop thinking about whatever problems I have for a few hours and do something simple and enjoyable.
But you'd be a bit frustrated about being taken seriously as a film critic if the only movies people in the mainstream had heard about were Adam Sandler comedies from 20 years ago, and you had to write about them.
Or at least, that's how I get to understanding how someone who writes about games doesn't "get" why people find Animal Crossing fun, finds it boring, and writes something like "it's actually political".
Does this not strike anyone else as just... incredibly pretentious? I have played every animal crossing except Animal Forest E+ which iirc never released outside of Japan. Is it not possible to want to make a more relaxing game?
While it's true that making a game that i.e. touches on real estate inherently makes a statement... I doubt that was the express goal of the developers.
> a “stalk market” for turnip commodities is mostly a loser’s game best avoided
You can consistently make money, in the long run. There are calculators available [0], not to mention there are online communities where people post their daily prices.
[0]: https://turnipprophet.io/
> And yet, isn’t this exactly the trade-off that real smartphones demand, a constant lifeline to new options, all more or less the same in nature, judged valuable by how many likes or hearts they accrue?
The developers obviously needed a UX solution to the various new features added to the game. It fits in with the game's opening theme of being a island getaway for a [presumably] millenialish crowd. I don't see why this is so complicated.
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Sometimes games are just games, and sometimes they -are- political commentary on society. This whole article just reeks of the bullshit I often heard while I was getting my film major.
I could sit here and spin articles full of flowery language about practically any game, distorting the mechanics to fit whatever political or sociological lens I wanted. Throw in current events for good measure.
> : “Do people find comfort in tedious, bureaucratic, pandering authoritarianism?”
I couldn't take this article seriously any further after this point.
I have a massive soft spot for Harvest Moon because I wrote my first code ever (in Python) to figure out what was the best crop to plant in summer - the answer was turnips, and 17 years later, I still remember that.
The crucial difference for me between AC and SV is that the former all but forces you to take a relaxed approach. SV felt more like a typical game where I tried to do everything the 'best' way, and optimize and 'level up' things. Which is a ton of fun, but also a bit stressful.
In AC, on the other hand, everything is real-time. Lots of activities can only be done once a day, if you build something it will take at least until the next day for it to show up. The shop refreshes items once a day. 'Collectibles' either randomly show up, at particular times of day, in particular months, or during particular events (easter, etc.).
Furthermore, this 'do nothing and relax' philosophy extends to pretty much everything, so for example buying stuff forces you to go through dialogs every time, and both buying and crafting can't be done in bulk (for the most part). Quite frustrating at times, but I do think it helps me at least not find clever ways to stress myself out and 'optimize' again. I have other games for that :).
Overall, AC is very free from sources of stress, while SV has them everywhere, though it depends on yourself on much they impact you. Also, you can also get stress in AC, but only by setting yourself goals, not through the game itself.
We have plenty of games that implement the logic of capitalist or resource-driven economies; some grand strategy games (notably those from Paradox Entertainment, like Hearts of Iron and Stellaris allow players to pursue other development trees, from fascism to communism, though I don't know how robust the underlying economic simulations are and the simple-play mechanics of the game necessarily means all options are quasi-autocracies.
Is anyone aware of a game dedicated to exploring competing economic models,perhaps through agent-based simulation or some of the methods explored in the emerging concept of econophysics and statistical mechanics applied to money relationships - I think Dragalescu is the pathbreaking author in this area. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1140/epjst/e2016-60213-...
If I’ve build my farm and talked to the villages enough to not bother farming anymore is there anything for me in animal crossing?
The game features are limited, villager interaction is inane, the items are repetitive, the goals non-existent. I understand the simple joy of a no-pressure game, but without a meaningful reward loop of any kind, the whole thing starts boring and gets only more so.
the way i think of animal crossing is: take a few microgames from warioware, set it in a jrpg town, and give the player their own doll house. it isn't deep, but that's an observation, not necessarily a criticism.
Thanks for the memories. Time to find some mecha games!
Maybe the reward loops aren’t what you think they are.
That conversation would have never happened without Animal Crossing. I’d consider that a pretty meaningful “reward loop” for me.
You could say this for every game.
Animal Crossing is simple, not poor, though some technical aspects are poor by modern standards.
> but without a meaningful reward loop of any kind
Meaning is in the eye of the players.
Instead, Animal Crossing is a political hypothesis about how a different kind of world might work—one with no losers. Millions of people already have spent hours in the game stewing on that idea since the coronavirus crisis began.
The characters in Animal Crossing do not tire. They do not go hungry and they do not feel pain. The buildings in the village to not erode, and the in-game items appear out of thin air, without a complex manufacturing process.
In the real world, just maintaining your current condition is a constant grind. Real life is a treadmill that never stops. If you're lucky, it just moving a bit slower.
This is like those literature memes where the teacher conjures up a fantastic narrative trying to guess what the author meant when he really just meant that "the door is red".
Apparently so!
Disclaimer: I actually think Universal Paperclips is brilliant, and agree that Animal Crossing has a lot of overly tedious and unnecessary mechanics. But I don't think it's fair to say that people who take comfort from it are just enjoying "tedious, bureaucratic, pandering authoritarianism".
I think this speaks to the sorry state of our society when the majority of Americans are apparently unable to give meaningful structure to their lives. We don't seem to prioritize non-physical self improvement in this country.
I kind of feel that Nintendo fanboyism pervades a large proportion of writing on games, but it would be better to be more objective.
Honestly, I don't like calling Animal Crossing a "game", because that's kind of inaccurate. Just like some "video games" are more like movies, and some are more like books, and some are more like roller coasters, Animal Crossing is more like a little garden to which you can tend.
If anything, I might compare Animal Crossing to a game of Minecraft on Peaceful Survival mode before I'd compare it to Stardew Valley.
There is also a big difference in tag price. For the price of AC I could SdV on three platforms, or buy copies for friends to play with me (I did that once).
What makes you think there’s nothing to discover and interact with just because the island starts off empty?