{"id":54817,"date":"2022-09-25T10:19:14","date_gmt":"2022-09-25T14:19:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=54817"},"modified":"2022-09-25T10:19:14","modified_gmt":"2022-09-25T14:19:14","slug":"animal-crossing-and-the-missing-genre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=54817","title":{"rendered":"Animal Crossing and the Missing Genre"},"content":{"rendered":"

I first played Animal Crossing when I was way too young for it. This wasn’t a case of being not ready for the content, like that time I watched someone play Doom when I was sevenThanks dad. 10\/10<\/span>. No, Animal Crossing required the player to read, which I could not yet do. <\/em>I tried my best, but I can only imagine the endless stream of little-kid-voice shouting out ‘what does this say?’, ‘can you read this for me?’, and ‘what’s he saying?’ that I imagine my poor mom just loved\u00a0<\/em>hearing day in and day out. But, by the end of it, wanting to play Animal Crossing was one of the driving forces of my actually learning<\/em> to read.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I have some really horrible learning disabilities and was a pretty late bloomer in that particular court. My younger brother, Peter actually learned to read before me (by a good few years) and at higher levels. So, it’s safe to say that my little animal friends were pretty integral to my growing up.<\/span><\/p>\n

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I will preface this entire article by saying that I am a biased source. <\/em>I loved the game young, and that is going to color my perspective on it. Maybe I would love the newer games if I didn’t have nostalgia for the old format. But, from my own experience, my complaints seem pretty founded. It’s not that the newer games are bad, it’s that they changed genres<\/em>. Lots of new players love the new games, and lots of old players love the new games, but they love them for entirely different reasons.\u00a0 Alien<\/em> and Aliens<\/em> are both good movies, and a viewer can like both, but they are very different formats.<\/p>\n

In the original gamesI\u2019m talking about the GameCube version of Animal Crossing, Animal Crossing: Population Growing, here, the first that reached the US<\/span> most of your time was spent doing one of five things: fishing, shaking trees, speaking with villagers, catching bugs, and running errands. The goal was to log in every day and do little tasks.<\/span><\/p>\n

This was long before the days of mobile games and rampant ads made that \u2018log in every day for a reward\u2019 system feel manipulative. The developers didn\u2019t have anything to gain from making it so time moved with the real-world clock. They weren\u2019t going to make any extra money because they chose that system; it was a true creative decision.<\/p>\n

There was a certain innocence to it. You logged in, did your little chores, and that was it. If you liked, you could spend hours fishing, or looking for bugs, but there wasn’t any extra incentive to do so other than enjoying the task in itself. Making money was slow. You did your chores and sold what you found or caught to Tom Nook for profit. You weren\u2019t going to pay off your loan in a single afternoon, and it wasn\u2019t expected for you too. The game was a little like a camping trip, meant to get away from it all.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the newest game, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, that innocence is just\u2026gone. The personality of it should be still there, the fishing, trees, and villagers are still there, but they begin to feel like\u2026mascots, rather than the heart of the game. <\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>There are seaplanes, cell phones, and ATMs. You can swim in the newer games, dive, and vault across rivers. There are other islands to visit, new stores to go to, and a connected interior designer game. You can customize your character, landscape your entire island, make clothes, visit friends, be bit by tarantulas, collect in-game currency (two types!), achievements! Make friends! Pay loans! Take a train! Campsite villagers! Be a mayor!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Okay, okay, fucking hell. Take a deep breath.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The days of \u2018log in and do a few chores\u2019 are long past. You still can do that, but you\u2019d make very little progress doing so. The economy has changed; things cost more now. Not only is there more to do, but there is more you have<\/em> to do if you want to continue in your world.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s still a cult favorite, people like all these things they added, in theory. But nearly everyone I meet who used to love Animal Crossing finds something about it just\u2026off, now. It\u2019s still a fun game, but it\u2019s no longer what they fell in love with.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The issue is the same with many other \u2018casual\u2019 games. A publisher might strike gold with that market once, but I have yet to see one continue to do so without just\u2026releasing the same game over and over again with very little change (except for aesthetics and minor story additionsCough cough, Harvest Moon<\/span>). Developers have no idea what people who like \u2018casual\u2019 games are looking for, and I partly blame the name of the genre. <\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span> \u2018Casual Games\u2019 just isn\u2019t very descriptive. When I say something is an \u2018action\u2019 game, everyone knows what I’m talking about. It\u2019s the same with horror, and survival, everyone knows what that looks like already. \u2018Casual\u2019 is a broad term, am I talking about Harvest Moon or Farmville? Animal Crossing or Candy Land? Hey, I really love casual games, you wanna play some Uno later?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The word ‘casual’ just doesn’t convey enough meaning, it doesn’t tell anyone about yourself to say you like them, and it doesn’t tell devs how to make them.<\/p>\n

The truth is, they\u2019d be much better off being called \u2018meditative games\u2019. The fishing, the tree shaking, the little chores. They don\u2019t do well as a gimmick because they used to be the point, to get away from it all and take a breath. ‘Casual’ is just as synonymous with ‘occasional’ and ‘irregular’ as it is with ‘relaxed’, which is a shame because it’s become the industry standard way of referring to these games. The word undermines the individual who plays it, to imply they are only doing so ‘casually’ and, at the same time confuses the developer trying to design it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Unfortunately, Animal Crossing misses that goal just a little more with every new title, and I will continue being a chump and buy every single one of them.<\/span><\/p>\n

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I first played Animal Crossing when I was way too young for it. This wasn’t a case of being not ready for the content, like that time I watched someone play Doom when I was sevenThanks dad. 10\/10. No, Animal Crossing required the player to read, which I could not yet do. I tried my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[618,120],"tags":[626],"class_list":["post-54817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-epilogue","category-videogames","tag-animal-crossing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54817"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54817\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54831,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54817\/revisions\/54831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}