Animal Crossing: New Horizons: Can a Game Take Care of Us?

Can a game take care of us? And do we want it to?

Animal Crossing: New Horizons was released on March 20, 2020--just as a pandemic kept many from family, work, restaurants, and the rest of their regularly scheduled lives. At its height, the game averaged one million copies sold per day, as players sought comfort, escape, and a virtual means of connection. In this book, game scholar Noah Wardrip-Fruin, isolated with his family by both lockdown and disability, explores the power of this game and the mixed emotions of a player and a parent trying to make it from one day to the next--while his kids’ obsession with Animal Crossing creates conflicts between them and pushback against family rules.

Wardrip-Fruin helps both Animal Crossing fans and newcomers understand the unexpected beneath the game’s surface: like the story of the first Animal Crossing, codesigned by an absent father seeking connection; like the hallmarks of video game manipulation, from ＂streak＂ bonuses to game-determined playtimes; like the appeal of endless shopping, in a kind of ＂safe＂ capitalism; and, of course, like the character quirks of a raccoon dog, Tom Nook, who provides a world of both safety and strange paternalism.

For many, this blockbuster game offered a comforting world compared to a reality of danger. In this first entry in the Replay series, Wardrip-Fruin offers an absorbing investigation of a game’s role in contemporary social life and a book that belongs on the shelf of anyone who loves or is puzzled by this Nintendo sensation.

Noah Wardrip-Fruin is professor of computational media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he codirects the Expressive Intelligence Studio. His books include The New Media Reader and How Pac-Man Eats.