Greetings from your favourite super-fan,today flexing her skills as an Animal Crossing
aficionado to welcome in the spring!
Note: all game images are taken from my copy of Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Nintendo,2020).
I obviously don’t own this franchise. Though I wish I did.
When life begins to spiral out of control, I think we as humans have the tendency to search for comfort within the aesthetic of our childhoods.
One particularly prevalent example of this search for sanctuary was seen during the first UK lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2020 millions of consumers worldwide, myself included, found themselves faced with a new kind of isolation.
Some took to Zoom with it's 'you're muted' aesthetic in both WFH and long-distance family quizzes.
Some took to the socially-distanced streets in protest of our society's systemic failures.
Some baked banana bread and drank whipped coffee until they passed out to the sounds of beabadoobee and Will Joseph Cook bridges.
And some people chose to find solace through purchasing Nintendo’s newest release;
a quiet, calm, and unapologetically cute title by the name of Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Nintendo, 2020).
Set on a deserted island, the Nintendo Switch game revolves around the player’s avatar
and their integration into a community of anthropomorphised animals. Similarly to the four previous main-series releases within the Animal Crossing franchise, the game has no ‘win’ conditions, no linear narrative, not even any real ending. Instead this game encourages an organic play style, prompting the player to create their own goals such as upgrading their house, filling their museum with the island’s cartoon fauna, or simply planting as many fruit trees as the island
can contain. A focus upon the relaxation found within repetitive tasks – weeding, fishing to simply walking around the island – transforms the game’s setting into a childly arcadia, where all colours are bright, all characters blithely pleasant, and everyone’s proportions are toddler-like. Within the console’s confines, the player has complete control over their island’s decoration, their own goals, and even the Non-Playable-Characters (NPCs) with whom they interact.
It may be this elicited sense of control during such a turbulent reality that led to the title selling an average of one million copies per day during its release month of March (Barbosa, 2020). As someone who playe this title almost every day during the long summer of lockdown, I found myself identifying with Kate Cox (2020), columnist for ARStechnica, who tapped into the
appeal of child-likened cuteness when describing her relationship with the game:
As a nation and a species, we are scared.
We are alone. We are trying, desperately, to
cope with unending weeks either of isolation
or of being cooped up with our families.
And along comes a simulation of a social life
that not only rewards our every step […and…]
importantly, gives us a sense 4 of total control.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons (henceforth ACNH) is a game marketed specifically upon
socio-culturally dominant notions of childhood and, to coin Hollingdale’s (1997)
term, ‘Childness’ which when combined with its overwhelmingly popular reception makes it an important text to include in contemporary discussions surrounding the individual child’s relationship to its aesthetic interpellations. Ngai (2012) describes ‘cute’ as an aesthetic ‘organised primarily around commodities and consumption’ (p.15), ‘that we harbo[u]r towards ostensibly subordinate and unthreatening commodities’ (p.1). Through this line of reasoning, the aesthetic of ‘cute’ is expressly linked to hierarchies of power, control, domination, and subjugation, especially
when encountered within a consumerist culture, reinforcing Adorno’s (1992) referral to cuteness as a ‘culinary’ aesthetic.
I argue that the lens through which we perceive and acknowledge cuteness can simultaneously be applied, as indeed it often is, to both real children and the conceptional ‘Child’ of market capitalism in order to disempower young agents and maintain aetonormative power in a culture reliant upon hierarchies of consumption and control. Harris (1992) perhaps describes this best through his description of the process by which children are made cute:
‘Cuteness, in short, is not something we find in
our children but something we do to them.
Because it aestheticizes unhappiness,
help-lessness, and deformity, it almost
always involves an act of sadism on the part
of its creator who makes an unconscious
attempt to maim, hobble, and embarrass
the thing he seeks to idolize.
The process of conveying cuteness to the
viewer disempowers its objects, forcing them
into ridiculous situations and making them
appear more ignorant and vulnerable than
they really are.’
(p.179)
Harris’ notions surrounding cuteness as ‘disempowering’ - though perhaps ignoring the empowerment found in embracing softness and its accompanying virtues of kindness and sensitivity - do ring true in a consumer culture where all ‘squidgy’ beings, from fluffy animals, to smiley-faced sweets, to our own children are perceived as being synonymous with weakness. It is of little wonder, then, that we as adults turn to our childhood favourites in times of crisis to search for comfort, those worlds which provide ‘frequent and pleasing visions of the snug place’ (Griswold, 2006. p.1). From
soft curves, to welcoming smiles, to childhood nostalgia, the intersecting notions of ‘cuteness’ and ‘childness’ combine to create a sense of control when adults feel bereft of it. The ‘childness’ of ACNH materialises further through an encoded sense of pastoral freedom, likened to ‘natural’ Romantic child of literary tradition. This encoded freedom allows the player to engage in virtual escapism through their customisable avatar’s new life- dubbed by the game as an ‘island getaway package’. The player is encouraged to build relationships with a community of fuzzy anthropomorphised
non-human ‘villagers’ as they simultaneously ‘build’ their island, filling it with furniture,
flora, and even bending the limits of the land through ‘terraforming’. In this vision of adult life, every day is without responsibility, with even the player’s mortgage owed to a podgy raccoon who will wait a consequence-free eternity to be repaid. Here, both narrative and challenge are player-constructed, with the game encouraging the player to ‘do whatever [you] want’ and ‘have fun!’, tailoring a slice-of-life experience where the player is in control of plot and aesthetic.
… And that’s me all done with my academic-reviewer deep-dive into the theory
of ‘cute’ and childhood - lucky you!
Self-deprecating asides aside, I hope it’s a little clearer as to theoretically why this game may have been just the tonic for loneliness that we all needed in 2020. In many ways, waddling about my little island wasn’t simply a virtual immersion into the freedom of childhood, though. In many ways, that first lockdown felt like a total reversion to my nascent state. Many young/new adults, failed by the current housing market, were faced with having to move back into their childhood bedrooms (that is, if your parents were lucky enough to have a home of their own). I will be the first to acknowledge my privilege to reflect upon 2020 with this rosy hindsight. In my tiny village I was granted plentiful space to breathe without fear of contracting the virus. Bubbles were easy to maintain, and despite the sense of isolation I sat with inbetween furiously revising for my final exams, I had the stability of home and far-away friends to keep me relatively calm.
Not everyone was so lucky, as we all know.
But one thing we did all share, I believe, was a complete lack of control over our circumstances.
Well, most of us. Government officials aside. When chatting with a colleague the other night,
we found our way into a conversation about mental health during lockdown. As with most other people I know, theirs took a colossal nose-dive during that prolonged period of helpless stasis. As we talked, we began discussing coping strategies. Completely unprompted, they mentioned ACNH, and stated emphatically 'that game saved lives'.
I couldn't agree more, I replied.
It is perhaps ironic that lockdown and the supersonically squishy ACNH coincided with the last few months of writing my undergraduate dissertation. In a decision that basically amounted to sticking a defiant finger up at academic pompousity, I bagseed my final year grade through writing about Nintendo's previous instalment in my most beloved series, Animal Crossing:New Leaf..to this day, my one biggest claim-to-fame is that I’m the only Cambridge academic I know of to have written a dissertation on this franchise.
(Self-aware Char side-note: please pause for a #humblebrag - I promise I'm not this much of a tool irl.)
… And what better reward to myself could there be for completing my dissertation than a Nintendo Switch and ACNH? Well, to be precise, I bought this reward three weeks before my dissertation was due - but can you blame a girl for wanting to partake in the cultural milestone that was its release date?
As I unboxed my wonderful new games console, smooth and pastel and perfect, I flashed back to a summer’s day in 2013. I recalled pressing the New Leaf cartridge into my scratched-up Nintendo DS. The satisfying click as it slotted in-place, and the wonder of starting up my game for the first time. The hours and hours of enjoyment it contributed to my life, and the significant impact it had on my heart, mind, and eventually university grade.
In that 2020 moment, I knew New Horizons would live up to its predecessor.
It did, of course. And then some.
ACNH gave me structure, it gave me support through long-distanced relationships and isolated times. It allowed me to embrace the passivity of my childhood reversion through gently cuddly neighbours, and the most beautiful seasonal changes I’ve seen in any game. As Spring swelled into Summer, I personalised my island, built a virtual community, created my very own personal paradise right when reality seemed positively apocalyptic.
Looking back on the photos I took on my first day in-game, it’s amazing to see how far the island, and I, progressed even when my external life was in stasis.
I sometimes feel like I’m still in stasis. Three years since ACNH also means three years since that first lockdown, and sometimes when I have a quiet moment to myself or I think about things too hard, there’s a niggling part of me that wonders what I’ve actually accomplished since I turned 21.
But sometimes hindsight can be a comfort. It felt nice this week, reminiscing back to the day I sat peering out of my tiny Welsh window waiting for the switch to be delivered. Unboxing it, starting up the game, getting overwhelmed by a wave of nostalgia for something I had yet to experience. Though lots about that time was difficult and lonely and sometimes horrible, the hours I spent with this game were so gratefully, pleasingly, pleasurably unproductive.
I returned to my game on Monday as a 3-year anniversary celebration. I haven’t played ACNH for about a year now, since the updates stopped and life took over. So my island now feels like a capsule unto itself, in stasis entirely as the rest of the world moves on from needing its care. But in stark contrast to my own fears of personal stasis, I was so pleased to re-enter my island and find that everything was just the same as I’d left it (well, aside from one field of flowers run completely amok - I thank my Capricorn stars that I paved most of my island with invisible tiles to prevent weed overgrowth!).
Upon starting the game I entered my perfectly feng-shui’d house and saw gown my avatar had worn on graduation day hung on the wall:
Leaving my house, I was immediately greeted by my favourite neighbour: a fuzzy blue elephant with a love of simple things. Like food. And critters. He’s a couple of oranges short of a fruits basket but there’s something effervescently charming about his simple tenderness. He greeted me with a smile, saying how glad he was to have me back, and gave me a recipe for some pear jelly to ‘nom’ down later.
It was nice to see him again.
I toured my island, greeting old friends and rediscovering the design of this place I knew last year like the back of my hand. I climbed to the highest point of my island, and found a telescope I’d put out to watch shooting stars with my housemate Sam one time after we’d moved in together. We’d spent a lot of time during lockdown visiting each other’s islands through wireless communication, so it only felt right to commemorate our in-person reunion with a quick return to the virtual world of our summers.
After about two hours in-game, I saved my game, and went to bed (in real life and in-game), with this rosy feeling that felt like coming home. I think the thing I've realised this week is that the ‘I’ of my avatar is not me - I am mutable and she is fixed - in many ways she was far more agential in my self-preservation than I ever was in 2020. Though there may be some problematic parts of finding comfort through cuteness and control, I can’t be too preach-y. I did not experience any of the past few years alone, and the fandom surrounding this game is testament to that fact. And in some semi-perverse way, returning to this oasis of stasis (Ostasis, if you will), felt like a form of therapy, as I was reminded of all the good things that can come from community and creativity.
In my world, like this game, there is no ending - just constant new horizons.
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