The Quiet Revolution of Animal Crossing

What the hell kind of video game consigns you to a mortgage when you boot it up? But Animal Crossing had taught my young son about the trap of long-term debt before he ever had a bank account

Maybe I had it all wrong all those years ago. I had imagined Animal Crossing to be a game about the world, one that offered ingenious, if abstract, life lessons. But the players enjoying it in quarantine celebrate it for escapism, which any form of entertainment might provide. Neither interpretation seems quite right. Even though it can function as

But now the smartphone serves up infinite ideas: One completed task just spawns another in its place. Players are motivated to do specific things for extrinsic rewards rather than doing whatever they like for the sake of intrinsic pleasure, and knowing it will be valued.

Nook never seems to benefit from his profits; he seems more like a reforming ecological collectivist, working behind the scenes to maintain the village’s fecund repleteness.

according to the Tom Nook doctrine, pastoralism and capitalism coexist perfectly. You can fish for high-value red snappers and sell them to buy espadrilles for your character, or 1950s-diner furnishings for your house. Or you can fish for never-before-seen specimens, to donate them to the museum. Or you can cast a line just to enjoy watching the mo

John Locke, who held that individuals had a right to turn natural resources that belonged to no one into individual property for personal use, through labor. The Lockean idea justified all manner of accomplishments and violations in American history, including the colonial seizure of Native lands and the justification of resource extraction via the

Amid social and economic chaos, with most people holed up inside, the days having melted into a shapeless slurry, Animal Crossing serves up unexpected consolation by offering surrogate habits—a structured, if fictional, alternative to normal life.

But the size and economies of these villages were too modest even to sustain their basic familial and mercantile needs, so the villages would take on collective debt—to pay for fishing nets and supplies, say. But nobody would ever pay back the debt, Clark explained. They didn’t have the money! Instead, it would bind the locals to their village—you

Is it better to omit this truth, to pretend that resources are infinite, as many games do, or to force the player to contend with the scarcity and violence intrinsic to manufacturing? It would be disproportionate to conclude that merely representing the dynamic implies that the game endorses it. And yet, Animal Crossing doesn’t decry the practice e