I’m breaking up with my Nook Phone.
Maybe the time has flown by.
It’s more that my interactions with the game feel, even now, relentlessly superficial.
That’s the basics of it, I guess.
New Horizons shifts this to an island setting, but it’s the same deal.
A battle at the heart of video games.
A battle between earning and being.
Gosh, that sounded pretentious.
(For more on this distinction yo see Edwin’sinfinitely more thoughtful piece on the subject.)
My purest memories of Animal Crossing probably go back to the GameCube.
My friend and I didn’t know what we were getting into.
The furniture went on forever.
Wingback chairs all the way to the bottom.
Even then there were two Animal Crossings.
The first Animal Crossing was infinitely the better game.
Those first moments were magic.
You cannot put a value on them.
The first time I met Wisp!
The first time I saw fireworks reflected in the pond.
But they were surrounded by things you could put a price on.
Getting the house and the wardrobe just so.
This game is not very good, I would argue.
But it is compelling.
My feeling back in the day was that Animal Crossing was testing you.
I always felt it was asking me to reject this second game and find the beauty in the first.
Maybe I was correct about that.
A tiny example of the withering.
I have asked around a bit, but nobody I know has seen a stork post-person in New Horizons.
Post, it seems, is just another system now.
But it is far from alone.
So much to collect.
So much to sound out.
So many galleries to fill - I’ll admit, I love filling them!
- so many ways to change the world and make it the way you want it.
Surely the phone is the point where New Horizons becomes satire?
Those little buzzes you get when you unlock something new!
Games, I’ve often worried, do not always trust us very much.
They don’t trust us to enjoy them without buzzers going off and pop-ins erupting and points going up.
This is not an original thought, I appreciate.
But it’s illustrated quite beautifully by Animal Crossing.
Can you do both?
Can you keep them in balance?
I worried for a long time whether I would keep playing once the gallery was finished.
It has been, you know, a compulsion.
The pleasure of drinking pretend coffee!
The first, better, game incarnate.
And yet yesterday I went into the Roost, sat down, had my coffee.
And then once it was done, my phone buzzed.
