Animal Crossing, page 1
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Edited by Patrick Jagoda, Kristen Schilt, and Ashlyn Sparrow
Accessible and engaging, the books in the Replay series connect authors’ personal experiences of gameplay with insights into a game’s development, reception, and implications for contemporary social life.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Can a Game Take Care of Us?
Noah Wardrip-Fruin
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2025 by Noah Wardrip-Fruin
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.
Published 2025
Printed in the United States of America
34 33 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-84070-3 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-84069-7 (paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-84071-0 (ebook)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226840710.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wardrip-Fruin, Noah, author.
Title: Animal crossing: new horizons : can a game take care of us? / Noah Wardrip-Fruin.
Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2025. | Series: Replay | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2025026052 | ISBN 9780226840703 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226840697 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226840710 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Game) | Animal Crossing video games—Social aspects. | Video games—Social aspects.
Classification: LCC GV1469.35.A67 W37 2025 | DDC 794.8/5—dc23/eng/20250615
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025026052
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
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For my fellow researchers
Max, Zoe, and Jen
Contents
Preface: I Hated Animal Crossing
Part 1: Journal of the Game Year
1. COVID Crossings
2. Narrow Horizons
3. Life Before Progress
4. How We Can Know
5. Selves and Shelves
6. The Meaning of Life
Part 2: Paternal Play
7. Mediated Fatherhood
8. Making Progress
9. Compelled to Play
10. The Crossing Contract
11. Outside the System
12. Flying Away
Afterword
Author’s Note
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Long Descriptions of Figures
Preface
I Hated Animal Crossing
I’m passionate about Animal Crossing: New Horizons.1
This book is the story of how that passion developed, how it turned to hatred, and then how that hatred came undone.
It’s the story of playing a game with my kids, while the COVID-19 pandemic swept by outside our windows.
It’s a story about fatherhood and paternalism, about trying to care for my kids as a disabled dad, and about a game codesigned by a father who hoped to caretake at a distance.
It’s a book about wondering, Can a game help take care of us in a time of crisis? Do we want it to try? And what do we have to give up if we want to fall into its embrace?
Noah Wardrip-Fruin
Santa Cruz, CA | April 2024
Part 1
Journal of the Game Year
1
COVID Crossings
“Dad, you need to look.”
I reluctantly raise my eyes from my phone.
“I planted this money tree,” Zoe says. “I used 10,000 Bells. I don’t want Max saying it’s his. See where it is?” There is a glowing spot in the simulated dirt on the screen.
“Between the museum and the river, behind that stump,” I say. I’m thinking: What are the chances I’ll remember? (Obviously, I did.) I’m thinking: How did I get here?
+ + +
It started with Psychonauts.1
Or it started with a pandemic. After a week or so of assuring parents that everything was fine, and tallying unexcused absences for kids kept home, the schools had officially closed. COVID-19 threatened to topple President Trump from the crest of the news cycle—so we were soon to get daily, live TV campaign events under the series name “White House Coronavirus Task Force.” Scientists were unsure how the virus spread, but the talk was about washing your hands, sanitizing surfaces, and not touching your face.
In our house, my partner, Jen, was feeling grateful for having bought cleaning products before the shortages, carefully wiping down our mail before opening it, and losing sleep to sanitizing our counters and floors nightly. I was as worried as she was but, since I’m chronically ill, I didn’t have the energy to stay up.
Our eleven-year-old, Zoe, was depressed and exhausted. Our five-year-old, Max, was talking about death and flying into rages. I didn’t have anything reassuring to tell them. Jen’s scientist sister thought there was every reason to be concerned—with no vaccine, no treatment, my “comorbid” conditions, and rapidly overflowing hospitals.
Our kids weren’t alone. All the kids we knew were soaking up the stress oozing from their parents. They were bleary after days of “school” staring at video images of elementary teachers who had been wrenched from their routines. (No more hugging students first thing in the morning, then helping them shape letters with Play-Doh or magnets.)
We were “sheltering in place,” as ordered, though we could hear the sounds of kids playing tag and hide-and-seek around the neighborhood.2 We closed the blinds so our kids at least wouldn’t see them.
I was looking for something I could do with them indoors. Preferably while lying on the couch. So I’d made a stack of the boxes of video games that might, at a stretch, be appropriate for kids their ages. (While I study and make games for a living, as a professor at UC Santa Cruz, I’d not done much with kids’ games.)
We tried Project Gotham Racing 3, and they enjoyed scrolling through the cars and painting them bright colors.3 But the driving itself was fiddly and unsatisfying. They looked dubiously at the cover of a Madden NFL installment. We’d already tried rolling sticky balls, swelling with accumulations of everyday items, in Katamari Damacy some months earlier.4 They’d enjoyed the surreal collection of household objects, and the two-sticks-plus-buttons movement controls were okay (you can get somewhere by toggling and mashing). But the level time limits made the kids fail again and again—and the over-the-top disapproval of the “King of All Cosmos” father character didn’t read as humorous to them. The game’s framing quickly sucked all the joy out of discovery and play.
In Katamari Damacy your dad, the King of All Cosmos, undercuts you even when you succeed. [long description]
I’d included one game that I thought was on the edge of acceptable. On one level—in terms of how the game worked—it had a lot of combat, which was not how I wanted to spend time with the kids. On another level—in the world of the game—it was all mental combat aimed at freeing people (and, um, a lungfish) from psychological problems that had come to dominate their lives. With that ambivalence, Psychonauts had a place in the stack.
Of course, they chose it next.
Playing Problems
Psychonauts is gloriously daft, though that’s not apparent at first. I was worried the kids would be bored by the opening, which has you wandering around a quirky summer camp for psychics, doing platforming challenges. But they loved it. The running and tree climbing and trampoline bouncing simulated the things they most wished they could still do in the everyday world. The collectibles—the pink “Psitanium” arrowheads buried in the ground, the spinning “PSI Cards” fluttering in the air—gave a feeling of progress. The campers—ranging from the dour, tinfoil-hat-wearing Dogen to the aggressively chippercreepy Clem and Crystal—gave it flavor and charm.
Through a series of training levels, our character Raz’s psychic powers developed. Max spent hours using Pyrokinesis to set fire to things around the campground. They both were enraptured by the hypermobility of a spinning, bouncing Levitation ball beneath their feet. And then the game took the turn that cemented it as “our game” for those weeks of the pandemic: a darker story made itself known and, as this happened, the levels shifted from exploring the supposedly well-adjusted heads of the camp counselors to working through the emotional landscapes of deeply troubled characters.
Our job, in gameplay, became finding ways to address the anxieties in others—while, in our home, we had no special powers to address our own. The characters’ problems manifested as surreal, funny geographies, which I could tell the kids found amusing—but we also talked about what was bothering the characters, and why it was bothering them, and how the virtual worlds we moved through reflected those feelings. It was distraction and fantasy and catharsis.
Riding a Levitation Ball thr
I had never expected us to continue this far with the game, or get this invested in it, so I hadn’t considered what would come next. The disk I’d included in the initial stack was a copy of Psychonauts I’d played on the original Xbox. It played fine on the Xbox 360 we still had hooked up to our TV, but it was significantly different from the version being sold then (in 2020). Specifically, the original Xbox version included a brutal shift in difficulty for the final sequence: the meat circus. I warned the kids that I had spent a full day beating it before they were born, while writing my dissertation. They wanted to try anyway.
We failed. Over and over.
I apologized and told them we should have started playing with the updated PC version of the game, with a much less difficult version of the ending. I suggested we watch a YouTube video of the ending instead. But Max wanted to go through it by playing. So after a few days, and brief dalliances with other games, I booted up a Steam version and we played the whole of Psychonauts through again from beginning to end.
It was a pleasure to return to the beginning already skilled at playing—and to talk through the meaning of foreshadowing that had only been mysterious the first time. (Why were there bunnies in our head?) But when we finally got back to the meat circus, and began to make progress, it was clear the game was entering a third phase: moving from dealing with the fears of other characters into Raz’s own.
The embodiment of those fears was a mental projection of his father—taunting us every time we failed one of the acrobatic challenges he set for us, belittling us even when we succeeded. Next came a projection of the antagonist’s father, whose bloodthirst and cruelty had produced the trauma driving the game’s story. Finally, we faced a two-headed monstrosity, formed after the fathers are put through a meat grinder together. The epilogue’s rapprochement with Raz’s real father didn’t erase that memory.
At this point, playing video games together had become something central to my new, pandemic-shaped life with my kids.5 It was a shared activity we all enjoyed—and enjoyed talking about when we weren’t doing it. Talking about Psychonauts was also a way into talking about issues like depression, anger, and trauma without having to directly reference what was happening in our house and around the world.
Further, playing games was something I was well enough to do every day. I knew none of us wanted to give it up. And yet I didn’t want to play through Psychonauts a third time immediately. (I had no desire to again sit with my kids through lines like “Don’t run or else Daddy’s gonna kill ya!!!”) So I got serious about looking around for another game for us. Hopefully one without dad issues.
Crossing Over
One game kept popping up. It was in my Twitter feed every time I visited. It was in news articles, and not just in the games press—though the coverage there was wall-to-wall.
Nintendo released Animal Crossing: New Horizons (ACNH) on March 20, 2020. It. Was. Huge.
Sales averaged about a million games per day for the rest of March.6 Soon, pandemic-inflamed ACNH sales contributed to a shortage of Nintendo Switch consoles—joining the perennial shortages of hand sanitizer, toilet paper, and N95 masks—with resellers routinely boosting the $300 asking price to $600.7 By August the 11.77 million copies sold in the first month had roughly doubled, to 22.4 million.8 By the end of 2020, sales had roughly tripled, to 31.18 million copies.9 (And by fall 2023 they would roughly quadruple, to 43.38 million.)10
While the Animal Crossing franchise had been popular before, this was a new level. New Horizons had, in roughly nine months, surpassed the combined lifetime sales totals of the first four games in the main series.11 These were the original Animal Crossing for the Nintendo GameCube console (2.27 million copies, 2001), the Animal Crossing: Wild World entry for the handheld Nintendo DS (11.75 million, 2005), Animal Crossing: City Folk for the Nintendo Wii console (4.32 million, 2008), and Animal Crossing: New Leaf for the handheld 3DS (12.82 million, 2012).12
ACNH’s sales—of roughly 31 million copies in 9.5 months—were in the ballpark of the roughly 34 million copies sold by 2013’s Grand Theft Auto V in its first 8.5 months.13 And the hugely ambitious, incredibly violent, and widely available (for Microsoft Windows and Xbox, as well as Sony PlayStation) GTA V has been named the “fastest-selling entertainment product ever” and “most profitable entertainment product of all time.”14 How could the comparatively modest, completely nonviolent, Switch-exclusive ACNH come to be in such rarefied company?
The consensus explanation is the pandemic. In our everyday world, we were realizing that more and more activity was unsafe. Going to work and school was unsafe. Attending social and family gatherings was unsafe. Going to the movies or a bowling alley was unsafe. Boarding an airplane or train was unsafe. Going to the grocery store or a restaurant was unsafe. Those who had to do such things were termed “essential workers”—and for the early months of the pandemic, many of them even got hazard pay, protective equipment, and the ability to socially distance . . . until corporations realized they could get away with not providing them, given mounting unemployment and the Trump administration’s disinterest in labor protections.
New Horizons offered a different world—a reassuring “normalcy” in a world of talking animals. As Sam Machkovech wrote for Ars Technica:
For nearly every real-life scenario that I’ve become anxious about, I’ve gotten a comforting virtual version on my new Nintendo-designed island. Yes, I can go to friends’ houses (friends who happen to be cute, anthropomorphic animals). Yes, I can go shopping. I can help strangers with everyday tasks. I can wander freely and finish a series of zen-like errands and chores. And I can hop on a plane and fly to other islands without facing scrutiny from community leaders (which, in this game, means a talking, sweater-wearing raccoon named Tom Nook).15
Meanwhile, what I saw on Twitter looked quite enticing—especially from people I knew. For example, on March 24, 2020, Anne Sullivan posted a picture with the caption “Did I spend 2 hours designing a dress to match my hair? Yes. Yes I did.”16
April Grow replied, in part, “I love the strength of the design tool and how easily it can be put all over the place.” Sullivan wrote back, “Part of the 2 hours was exploring the way the AI works to round out the pixel work and how it groups the color areas. Causes issues for seam matching but overall v. cool!”
This was enticing because I trust their opinions. Sullivan and Grow are two alumni of the Expressive Intelligence Studio, a research group that Michael Mateas and I codirect. Both of them are now faculty doing research at the intersection of computation and crafting—one at Georgia Tech and the other at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Sullivan cofounded the crafting tool startup Play Crafts (between getting her PhD and becoming a professor). Grow was the lead author of our group’s twenty-thousand-word review of crafting systems in games, and then wrote her dissertation on computationally mediated approaches to textile crafts. If these two think a game’s crafting system is impressive, there is no doubt that it is.
The matching hair and dress. Image by permission of Anne Sullivan. [long description]
Increasingly, ACNH sounded great to me. A balm for pandemic fears. An exciting new crafting system. A level of kawaii (Japanese cuteness) that spoke to me—and that I thought would speak to my kids.
But there was no way I was spending $600 on a Switch. So I looked for other games.
We had some great experiences. One was Play with Gilbert, where they got to embody cats in a shared world.17 Max enjoyed role-playing his cat’s relationships with the game’s other cats and its humans, while exploring the world and its physics. Zoe enjoyed the goal-directed play of collecting hidden objects and reaching challenging locations. It was an environment in which their different play styles could bring them together and let them drift apart freely, all while talking together in front of our TV. (It set our expectations for multiplayer gaming—expectations we would later see violated.)
