On Animal Crossing
Created: 2019-07-01 (12:00:00) — Modified: 2025-06-01 (15:46:42)Status: in progress
I love the original Animal Crossing. For all the mechanical improvements the later iterations have brought, none has captured the same magic sense of moving somewhere new that the first game. I don’t think this is just nostalgia, either. The simpler, more jaggedly obstructive shape of the game worked in its favour.
The theme of Animal Crossing is moving to a new place, the things you have to adapt to, the things that make no sense, the neighbours who are friendly and the ones who want nothing to do with you. The series has a reputation now for being cozy, bordering on saccharine, but the original version is so weird. Tom Nook gains his unscrupulous reputation from this game. Booker the police dog tells you to stay alert when you’re out after dark. There are wanted posters pasted up in the station. The after hours postal clerk is openly hostile to you. Villagers are openly hostile to you. Moles yell at you.
The sharp localisation. Sharp villagers. It’s not because bobble-headed animals being rude is funny. (Although they do say consistently funny, unexpected, sometimes alarming things.) It’s also because this frames the way you, the player, relate to the game world. You are an ambiguous outsider, maybe not totally on the outs, but not really fully part of the life of this town either.
Postage systems
A port of a Nintendo 64 game with no online capability, Animal Crossing had to rely on clever workarounds to let players communicate with one another, and even then, the process was clunky. It was also more fun for that reason.
Start with the secret code system, which is roughly analogous to the later games’ mail systems. The idea was to let players send items from one town to another, despite the game having no networking capability as such. If you wanted to send something to a friend in a different town, here is how it worked. You would meander over to Tom Nook’s store, item in hand, and input your friend’s name and town. Tom Nook would take your item and then give you a thirty-digit code, which you would have to write down and then figure out how to get to your friend outside of the game.
Your friend would meander over to the Tom Nook of their own town, code in hand, and input it. Remember, this was using the Gamecube controller and not a keyboard. Thirty digits. But if your friend could input the code without fucking it up, and if they were the right recipient, in the right town, Tom Nook would hand the item across.
(If your friend turned out not to be the recipient, say, because you spelled their town wrong, then the item was lost in transit forever.)
What a terrible system. But there’s something gained in the sheer logistical effort it takes to mail an item in this game, reminiscent of the real effort and uncertainty of sending things through the actual postage system, and which for that reason produces the same special joy when you do manage to receive something.
The mailing systems in the later games streamline the process. Select an item, pick a name from a drop-down list and send it on its way. Animal Crossing in contrast places the whole responsibility on you, the player. In doing so it brings an almost material sense of transit, a gift crystallised in a cipher. This is such a fascinatingly paratextual thing for a game to do, even if the whole reason for it is to work around its own outdated programming.
Travelling
Mailing an item requires you to do the busywork of encoding it and transmitting it, by handwritten note, IRC missive or forum post, then having someone else decode it at the other end. Actually visiting another town, or having someone visit your town, went a step further in requiring you and/or your memory card to go physically travelling.
Animal Forest, the original Nintendo 64 version of the game, ran entirely off a cartridge. Animal Crossing saved everything instead to the memory card. The save file took up almost all of a memory card’s capacity, but it opened up new possibilities for travel.
If someone lent you their memory card, with its own entire little world loaded in, you could now go-a-visiting. Plug your card into the first slot and theirs into the second. Now the train became accessible, and you could transit across to explore an unfamiliar town at your leisure. Your friend’s character would be curiously absent during your visit.
I recall you could leave your mark on the town, to an extent. You could chop down trees, buy Tom Nook’s entire stock for the day, gather all the fruit and get bullied by the villagers. Just like home! You could, in short, have a whole day’s adventure and return home at the end, pockets full of fruit and furniture, your friend’s neighbours commenting on the strange visitor forevermore.
I find the physicality of storing your game in a cartridge and carrying it around to be very appealing, too. It’s like a complicated, clockwork Polly Pocket. It’s like keeping a universe in a bottle, being able to peep in at select moments to see what’s going on. Anecdotally, a lot of people appear to prefer the handheld versions of these games. I suspect having a whole miniature world stored on a Nintendo DS, or 3DS, appeals in the same way as the memory card originally did.
The secret code system required you to transpose information into real space, convey it, then recode it back into virtual space. The save file system embeds that virtual space within a physical thing, a compact grey brick you can carry around and plug in elsewhere. They both only really exist due to technical limitations. They are clunky workarounds and yet they still produce their own forms of satisfaction.
This seems the opposite of good design, to have these systems that are riddled with friction, uncertainty, logistical hassle. You’d think the streamlined systems in the later games would be an improvement. But in my own experience, I barely ever sent mail to other players and the experience of having to host other people in my town or island was deeply awkward. It emphasised just how inadequate the games were as a medium for trying to communicate with other people.
There is rich, and seemingly largely unexplored potential in the way games can be precisely the opposite of user-friendly. In the way they can resist easy progress, insist (even apologetically) that their players work within convoluted and sometimes just bizarre parameters, expose their own limitations as software running on hardware. In being obstructive and even alienating.
See also
Endmatter
Tags: @games @in-progress @virtual-spaces
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