Readers of my livejournal (all, like, 3 of you- love you guys!) will be well aware of my months long addiction to the Nintendo DS video game Animal Crossing: Wild World. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Animal Crossing, it’s a game wherein you play the role of a person who leaves home for the first time only to end up in some rinky-dink little village in the forest populated by talking animals. You’re greeted by a raccoon named Tom Nook who sends you on some odd jobs to make money and builds you a house. The only problem is that he charges A LOT for rent. And that’s the entire premise of the game. You walk around, talk to your animal neighbors, do a little fishing, plant flowers and grow gardens, decorate your house, write and receive letters, make a little money and pay off your rent. The town has its own holidays, animals move in and out and just like life itself, the game promises something different every day. Basically, it is its own self-contained virtual community, albeit one where porcupines sell custom made T-shirts.
It sounds silly but after I got into it I really started to invest emotionally in my town and the animals that populated it. I meticulously cared for my garden, sent affectionate notes to my favorite characters (like Marina the friendly octopus and Big Top the lazy elephant). I played every day, an hour a day, for four straight months. When characters left, I became sad. I taught them to swear and had one of them call me a “mangina.” In a weird, unexplainable way, I loved them. And having joined several Animal Crossing livejournal communities, I learned I wasn’t alone in my response to the game.
This article from the website Game Career Guide seeks to explain the choices Nintendo made in terms of game design to create the connection between the player and his/her town and where the game fits (or doesn’t fit) into recent trends in game design. Gamers may find this article interesting for being an intelligent and detailed look into how games are constructed. But for a culture vulture like myself who happens to play games, I like the article simply because it basically reads like a college dissertation written about a videogame, which is in stark contrast to the mostly vapid and infuriatingly stupid writing on games and game culture polluting the internet.
Animal Crossing and its cousins Harvest Moon and The Sims are proof that games do not need to depict realistic acts of violence to be entertaining and popular. In light of recent violent events that have sent shock waves through American society, this is important. Video games are often the scapegoat when incidents like Virginia Tech and Columbine happen and with games like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas being played in millions of homes across America it’s easy to see why. However, it is clear that gaming is here to stay and is becoming more and more a part of the mainstream. And I believe the more intelligent discourse we have about gaming, whether we’re talking about its psychology, art, trends or design, the closer we come to understanding what makes our society, and ourselves, tick.
Via GoNintendo
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