Animal Crossing: Philosophy Of
A screenshot depicting the Island Town Hall in Animal Crossing. (L-R) Tom Nook, Player, Isabelle.
When was the last time you did absolutely nothing? Time set aside just to exist. I feel that human beings have a desire to be busy. Most people seem to believe that there is some intrinsic good to being busy. If we were to stop for just one second, we fear that we would be labelled as lazy. I know I have fallen into this “busy trap” [1], especially after starting university. After a gruelling 6 weeks, recess week had come and I finally had some time to slow down. Pulling myself away from my work, I glanced at the switch next to my monitor. It then hit me: I had not tended to my island in Animal Crossing: New Horizons (ACNH) in months!
ACNH is an adorable sandbox game made by Nintendo for the Nintendo Switch. ACNH was released in March 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and has since soared in popularity. Dropped onto an island in the middle of nowhere, you are “parachuted” [2] into the role of mayor and left in charge of running the island as you see fit. Not to fear, as you are aided by Tom Nook (a Tanuki who has been depicted on the internet as the landlord of the island with a monopoly on property) and Isabelle (a Shih Tzu and the island’s administrator). Your job is to grow the island and make it habitable for other villagers to move in, pay off your home loans imposed on you forcefully by Tom Nook, and engage in consumerism.
The most interesting thing about ACNH is that the game does nothing much in the way of incentivising players to progress, in the traditional sense. Games usually have some distinct end goal: resolving a narrative, overcoming a final challenge, or fulfilling the main objective. However, in ACNH, after a short tutorial on how the game works, the player is pretty much left to their own devices. There are some incentives in the form of a premium in-game currency, Nook Miles, which players can acquire by completing optional goals like paying off their mortgage. Players are nevertheless not penalised for not pursuing these goals. Instead, one can sit down on the beach, listening to the crashing of waves, the rustling of palms, and the beautifully crafted soundtrack.
If there is no pressure to play the game, then why are so many people, myself included, drawn to such a game? Of course, there are many reasons one can cite, including how the game’s incentives and optional goals are good enough to engage the player. However, I believe the main reason that drew people into the game was: agency.
Agency, as defined by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “denotes the exercise or manifestation of … [an agent’s] capacity [to act]” (Schlosser, 2019). In other words, agency refers to our ability to choose what we want to do. In ACNH, we are given more agency compared to other games. The player gets to choose what they want to do. The player can do everything mentioned above or just lounge around, essentially mimicking their real-life selves in the game. For example, I stayed up till 2 a.m. sitting around my Animal Crossing home after spending the entire day remodelling it. I also went around my museum to admire the fossil collection I completed a few days prior, reading all the descriptions the game gave for each fossil display. The ability to choose to do seemingly nothing at all points to the higher level of agency provided by ACNH compared to most games.
Agency also manifests in ACNH in how the game gives the player more abilities and options for decoration on the island. This is the first Animal Crossing game that allows the players to decorate their entire island with purchased items bought with in-game currency, bells. Players can also change the very landscape of their island. If they want to add a river, hill, or even a garden, they can do it in ACNH. All these new freedoms and abilities allow the player, an agent, to exercise their agency.
Giving the player this much agency allows the player to question the purposes of their action. Why is it that they would gladly stay up to literally just walk around their island? The answer might be to admire what they have achieved, but I retort with: what was the achievement? Painstakingly collecting all the fossils in the game is a task that nets no tangible benefit to the player other than completing said collection. Here, the Dutch concept of Niksen might be able to help us understand why people may want to undertake actions which may have no inherent meaning.
Niksen is a Dutch word meaning: “To do nothing, to be idle, or doing something without any use” (Gottfried, 2019). The easiest way to practise Niksen is to simply sit in your chair and do nothing. Niksen asks one to not think at all, to let the mind wander and remain free. Practitioners are not limited to literally remaining idle. They can be engaged in a task, but that task should not preoccupy the mind. The mind has to be allowed to roam while the body busies itself with the task. In essence, whatever we do, the action itself cannot be the focus. Niksen has been shown to reduce a person’s stress and likelihood of burning out, and I feel that this is a very intuitive concept to grasp. When our mind is occupied by a temporary task, the important task is brought out of focus and we are less bothered by it.
We can see parallels to this in the tasks undertaken in ACNH. All the actions done in-game have no use by themselves. Rather, ACNH serves as a medium for the player to let their mind and creativity wander as they engage in tasks that seem monotonous. Imagine chopping down a tree, getting wood to craft items, selling said items for bells, and using those bells to pay off a mortgage. A mortgage to a house that you are not even living in in real life. What I described might be seen as a chore to most people. However, when packaged in a game like ACNH, with its design aesthetic and characters, it suddenly feels inviting. ACNH involves a player’s choice, the exercising of their agency, to play in that manner. We become willing to spend time in ACNH because it allows us to choose to do meaningless tasks that decompress us from the stresses that may be, simultaneously allowing us to re-evaluate our actions for doing things.
After all this exploration, what is it that I am trying to drive at? We have become increasingly predisposed to accept the idea that being busy is good, especially when placed in an environment that values and rewards such busy-ness. ACNH reminds us of the importance of rediscovering the purposes behind the actions we take. Moreover, ACNH is a fascinating topic for the average PPE student. ANCH has a surprisingly complex economy that has been interwoven with our real-world economy in the form of a black market, and how the politics of the 2020 US Presidential Election [3] and Hong Kong riots bled into people’s islands [4]. This shall be a topic for another day. For now, let us do a little nothing and Welcome Horizon [5].
Written by Lim Kian Ian
Edited by David Lim Ming Quan
Notes:
[1] The Busy Trap was an opinion piece written in 2012 by Tim Kreider and published in the New York Times. It suggested that the average American had more things going on than they did in the past.
[2] “Parachuted” is Singaporean slang used to describe high-ranking military personnel getting a high-profile job in the public sector after exiting the military.
[3] The Biden administration campaigned in ACNH during the 2020 election. This led to the creation of “Biden Island”, which voters could visit to learn more about his campaign and their voting rights.
[4] During the Hong Kong riots in 2020, some people took to ACNH to decorate their islands with anti-Chinese propaganda and post images online. They went as far as to take their fishing nets and repeatedly whack an image of Carrie Lam, head of government of Hong Kong, placed on an easel.
[5] Welcome Horizon is the ACNH opening theme played by K.K. Slider, ACNH’s in-game celebrity music artist.
Reference List
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Baues, F. (2023). Niksen – The Dutch Art of Doing Nothing. StudySmarter UK. https://www.studysmarter.co.uk/magazine/niksen/
Bogost, I. (2020, April 17). Animal crossing isn’t escapist; it’s political. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/04/animal-crossing-isnt-escapist-its-political/610012/
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