Why does he go on and on about whether the game accurately represents modern life? It seems like this misses the point of games in general, and a game for pre-teens about talking animals specifically.
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".