Animal Crossing

After I left my parents' place, I stopped off to spend a day in Providence where my friend July lives with her husband Dennis. July and I dated long ago, and even though I don't see her very often, she's definitely way up in the rankings of my very best friends. I tend to like people who have a 'heart of gold', but her heart goes well beyond that.

So we were hanging out, playing on her Wii, while Dennis was out with his two kids from a previous marriage, celebrating the eldest's birthday. Later on they came by for dinner and cake (Dennis is a really good cook), but right then July and I had the house to ourselves.

She showed me her dance game, explaining that she really knew she didn't look exactly like the sexy cartoon person on the screen whose moves she imitated, but that it totally felt like she did. She danced around for awhile, and I watched, and I could see how she did make all the same moves, but they weren't quite right. The cartoon character had a much more flexible spine, and had much better control over her torso and pelvis, so that while July got a lot of the arm and leg movements right, her pelvis and torso could only essentially arch or not arch, and not much of either. But still - it was dance, and it was exercise, and she did very well. When she invited me to try it, I immediately declined. I may love dance notation, but as a dancer I'm fit only to laugh at.

We also played Wii bowling, and I showed her the hundred pin variant. She'd never played it with the ball on manual control, so she kept dropping the ball too soon or too late, which gave me plenty of opportunity to make jokes. But she never got discouraged, and ended up playing well. Neither of us got a strike though.

We also played ping-pong, which I won handily. She wanted to do sword fighting, and complained that I only chose games that she wasn't good at. I told her it was easy - I just waited for her to suggest something, and then I'd pick something else, thus maintaining my superiority.

It was all playful banter. Recently - well, several months ago - Dennis's kids had given her a copy of Animal Crossing: City Folk, and she hadn't played it at all, beyond creating a character and walking around a little. Since they were coming over later, she was a little embarrassed that they'd realize she hadn't touched their gift since they gave it to her.

I first played Animal Crossing when another ex-girlfriend of mine, Alexandra, brought her daughter Leocadia over to my parents house one day for a visit, and Leocadia had a copy. This was years ago. She introduced me to it, and I thought it was beautiful! The plants were pretty, and really all the images had a discrete cuteness all their own, that I found very appealing. I loved the idea of walking around this made-up world, looking at the pretty things.

So now at July's house, I wanted to play, and she was happy about that because it meant that her step-kids might not realize she hadn't played it since they gave it to her.

So I started it up. Her character had sleep bubbles coming off of her from being unplayed for so long, and her hair was messed up. She also had exited the game improperly, and so the hedgehog character popped out of the ground and gave me about a 5 minute lecture on how to exit the game properly.

After that I checked out my inventory. There was nothing. I had a house with a candle and a radio. And roaches, which I proceeded to step on. There was nothing in my pockets.

I went over to Tom Nook's store, and discovered that I hadn't even met all the townspeople yet; so I ran around for awhile and did that. Then Tom Nook hired me to do some errands, which I did; and then I bought a fishing rod, net, and watering can.

I ran around town for a bit, catching fish and insects, and harvesting pears, and making donations to the museum, and selling things to Tom Nook.

It's a nice town. I got stung by bees a couple of times, but fortunately I had purchased some medicine as well, which fixed me right up. Meanwhile, Tom Nook's store was right next to the Town Hall, which is always convenient; and the museum was not too far away either.

July sat with me and watched, getting more and more horrified all the time. She kept saying things like, "but what's the point of the game? What are you supposed to do?"

I explained that you had to pay off your mortgage and upgrade your house; and do favors for the townspeople to stay on their good sides; and earn money by selling things and making investments; and stock the museum full of insects and dinosaur bones and fish and paintings; and donate to the town fund so the town could have nice events.

July was like, "Aaaaaugh! That's the way my life is right now! Why would I ever play this game! This is horrible! I already have to go to work and pay off my mortgage and deal with the neighbors, and do all that other crap. What the hell kind of game is that!"

So I kept playing, and she kept being freaked out about it.

Actually, Animal Crossing is disturbing on a number of levels. For one thing, the game characters periodically nag you to get all your friends to play. Which I guess is not surprising; except that the typical audience for this game is little kids who have no defenses. So it amounts to very aggressive hard-sell marketing tactics used against small, innocent children, in a way that grown-ups are not likely to detect, unless they've been playing the game themselves for awhile, too.

Another thing about the game is that it really is all about how to be a model citizen, without in any way questioning what that might mean. So, you give charitable donations, help out your neighbors, all the while nursing your own finances and being very acquisitive, decorating and enlarging your home over and over again. And you do all this while being a quiet, obedient person who goes along with whatever anyone else says to you, or risk their wrath. Their wrath, by the way, is expressed in subtle insults, cold shoulders, and by ignoring you or even moving away to a different town.

It's an ugly game.

I actually used to play it a lot with Lauren for awhile, after she got her Wii. I'd asked her specifically to get that game, because of my fond memories of Leocadia. So, Lauren and I each had our own character in the game, and we'd play whenever I came over.

What happened was, Lauren quickly developed a very strict approach to the whole Animal Crossing world. For one thing, she didn't care what any of the neighbors though of her. She wasn't interested in them at all. What she cared about was money, and lots of it. She also cared about maintaining the town so its grass was always well tended. In Animal Crossing, if you don't tend the grass, it wears away until you're left with just raw dirt. To keep the grass green, you have to plant flowers, and keep the flowers watered, and avoid running too much over the ground with your feet.

So Lauren set up pathways through the town, leading to all the different places one might want to go; and she planted flowers along the pathways; and set up rules that we weren't allowed to run on the bare grass, but only along the paths, unless we were specifically looking for buried treasure, or harvesting fruit from the trees.

Every time she logged in, she'd buy out Tom Nook's supply of flowers, and plant them around town; and water all the flowers that needed it (they turn brown before it's too late to save them); and she'd stick to her paths; and she'd harvest all the fruit from the trees (she'd filled the town with peach trees, worth 500 bells a piece, instead of just 100 for the pears).

Pretty soon Lauren had paid off her house, run out of upgrades, and was well on the way to having millions of bells in her bank account.

But the game got to be very dull. Once we were restricted to running only along the paths, and there was such wealth growing on all the trees, and there was nothing left to buy, and nothing left to donate to the museum, it turned out there was not much left to do. So she and I both lost interest and stopped playing so much.

I'm not really sure it would have been any different if she'd focused more attention on staying on the good side of her neighbors. She would have just been running around talking to all of them, sending them letters and presents, and visiting them in their homes. Where does that really lead?

At a deeper level, there's a more fundamental question that has always intrigued me. What sort of game could successfully model real life, either at the personal level or the societal level? I've often thought I'd like to design a board game that would model capitalism, and show it going through the various processes that capitalism is prone to. I think such a game would be like my argument to people, in favor of more and better social programs, and whatnot. I could just play that game with my libertarian friends, and watch them get frustrated with the inequalities their free market ideologies would lead to, and watch them gradually come around to implementing various social programs and taxes and whatnot.

At least, that would be the hope. But it's very difficult to come up with a real model of capitalist society, that libertarians would agree was accurate, and that would still be simple enough to play as a game.

Meanwhile, my dad is a Marxist theorist, with strong ideas about all of this stuff, and I've sometimes tried to work out a ruleset for such a game with him. But he's so into the complexities of social theory, that the whole concept of trying to simplify it into a playable game is not so appealing to him. So our conversations about it have never led to an actual playable game. But I haven't given up.

Animal Crossing, on the other hand, represents sort of the opposite of what I'd be aiming for. In Animal Crossing, the situation is really locked up, and can never change. There's always Tom Nook's store, and there are always the institutions and structures and natural behaviors of the surrounding environment; and the neighbors have a fixed range of behaviors. So it's not really surprising that Lauren was able to essentially crush the game. If I developed a 'society' game, I'd want it to be flexible enough all of those fixed ideas would really be mutable. Not unlike Nomic; but with more structure built in from the start.

So yeah. I hung out with July and played some Wii, and we had a lovely time, and a lovely birthday with her husband and step-kids. But they did notice that she hadn't played the Animal Crossing they'd given her. They spotted it right off, when they saw she was still running errands for Tom Nook.