6

Thursday, May 28 , 2020
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
ARTS

A ‘New Horizons’ diary

The music that plays at 5 a.m. in 
“Animal Crossing: New Horizons” is 
beautiful. I’ve only heard it in-game 
once. Not because I’m some Fortune 
500 freak who thinks waking up at 
the ass crack of dawn is the key to 
success, or because I woke up in the 
middle of the night and booted up the 
game because I couldn’t go to sleep. 
No. Because I had been playing “Ani-
mal Crossing” for about three hours 
through the dead of night, planning 
and landscaping and building a dis-
count Versailles hedge maze on my 
island.
I was so into this little project that 
I lost track of time, only to be slapped 
with a reminder when the Town Hall’s 
bells tolled at the top of the hour. 
Although time in “Animal Crossing” is 
synced up with time in the real world, 
the day doesn’t officially start anew 
until the clock strikes 5 a.m. You’re 
momentarily frozen and thrown into 
a loading screen to watch the daily 
announcements from the series favor-
ite shih tzu Isabelle, which I usually see 
after rolling out of bed around 2 p.m. 
The soundtrack greets you kindly once 
you regain control of your character. It 
mirrors the soft sound of ocean waves 
rolling in on your island’s beaches and 
the morning blue-green sky. It’s beau-
tiful, and I never want to hear it again.
***
Oh, “Animal Crossing: New Hori-
zons,” there was a time when I thought 
you would be the one to fix my life.
After a year’s worth of intensifying 
depression, mounting attention issues, 
dropped classes, exhausting jobs and 
dealing with all the shit life throws at 
you post-coming out as a trans woman, 
I thought 2020 was going to be the year 

where I got my life back on track. I was 
going to commit to school, get a stable 
and decent source of income, pursue 
my hobbies, be the best I could for my 
friends. “Animal Crossing” was going 
to be the reward for a life well lived, 
almost poetically placed in mid-March 
as the semester really started to ramp 
up. I would live each day to the fullest, 
and treat myself by paling around on 
my island paradise for 30 minutes or so 
before a dutiful 11 p.m. bedtime.
It hardly lasted a month. I burnt 
through the two or three free absences 
in all my classes, and skipped some 
more. I forgot to complete an earth sci-
ence online exam worth a third of my 
grade before the deadline. I processed 
the terse term withdrawal paperwork 
for the second time in my University 
of Michigan career. I held back tears 
in the lobby of the Office of Financial 
Aid as I wondered if I had fucked my 
scholarship for good. I stayed in bed 
too much, and ate too little. Suffice to 
say, it sucked.
Oh, “Animal Crossing: New Hori-
zons,” there was a time when I thought 
you would be the one to fix our lives.
The way it all went to shit was kind 
of funny, I guess. Spring Break was 
almost over, and Bernie Sanders was 
holding a rally in Ann Arbor. The sheer 
volume of people crammed into the 
fenced-off Diag was electric on that 
Sunday afternoon, but mortifying to 
recontextualize now two months later. 
I voted for Bernie in the primary that 
Tuesday, and that night I was grinding 
“Super Smash Bros. Ultimate” with 
my friends only to read the news that 
he had inexplicably lost every county 
in Michigan to Joe Fucking Biden. Oh 
yeah, and the first cases of COVID-19 
had been confirmed in Michigan.
You know, Coronavirus, That Thing 
That Had Been Happening In China 
But All Things Considered Will Prob-

ably Not Be A Big Deal In America. Or 
at least, that’s the picture I got from 
the Trump administration mouth-
pieces who were broadcasted on the 
nightly news, which I only ever caught 
if it was on the TV in the dining hall’s 
break room. I would aimlessly listen 
to them proclaiming the situation was 
under control, not thinking much of it 
while chewing on undercooked noo-
dles before I got back to my shift. But 
there I was, sitting in the game room 
of a fancy apartment building, about 
to realize that This Thing Was Quickly 
Going To Be A Big Deal. The Univer-
sity cancelled classes swiftly after the 
news came out, and soon enough the 
entire campus was shut down and my 
job with it.
It seemed like almost all my friends 
in Ann Arbor were gone within the 
following week, graduating seniors 
realizing they had sat in for their last 
physical class without even realizing it. 
I was left in this void of an apartment 
I once thought of comfortably as my 
home, with no loving family to retreat 
to and only my girlfriend to help main-
tain my sanity.
But hey, at least “Animal Crossing” 
was around the corner! In the first 
week of quarantine my Twitter time-
line was practically clamoring for it, 
lamenting the quarantine but acknowl-
edging that the game perhaps couldn’t 
come at a more apt time. A few days 
before release some fans who have 
probably never known real struggle in 
their life were even sharing an oh-so-
polite letter to Nintendo pleading with 
the company to welease their wittle 
funny animal game eawly. “Animal 
Crossing” would arrive on the wings 
of an angel to help ease the whiplash 
from all this sudden imposed isolation, 
convince us that maybe staying inside 
ain’t all that bad when we have cute 
and cozy video games to tide us over.

Oh, “Animal Crossing: New Hori-
zons,” there was a time when I thought 
you would be the one to fix it all. And 
oh, how wrong I was.
***
First impressions were promising. 
With past games in the series, all there 
is to do upon startup is complete some 
menial tasks for the omnipotent and 
contentious Tom Nook as you start to 
pay off your initial home loan. After 
about 30 minutes, the game starts to 
open up and you can play it however 
you want: Some would turn the game 
off satisfied and pick up where the 
game left off the next day, while oth-
ers would “time travel” by manually 
pushing their system clock forward 
and speed through days to cut down 
the wait on new items, shop upgrades, 
monthly events and the like.
“New Horizons” takes that thirty 
minutes of initial questing and beefs it 
up into something resembling a story, 
with the goal of making your island a 
vacation hotspot, which takes about 
two week’s worth of in-game days to 
complete. My girlfriend and I had the 
game preloaded on our Switches so 
we could play at midnight on March 
20, and we stayed up until about four 
in the morning floored by how fun and 
engaging the new crafting features 
and “Nook Miles” achievement-track-
ing system were compared to the first 
couple hours of past games.
We played in real time, so over the 
next week, we crafted cute little out-
door spaces for new villagers, built a 
shop for the Nook’s adorable appren-
tices Timmy and Tommy and upgrad-
ed the cramped Resident Services tent 
into a modern Town Hall. We laughed 
at the memes on Twitter about how 
you could get rich by catching taran-
tulas or how people stockpiled their 
island with bugs and fish waiting for 
the museum to open and its curator 
Blathers to start taking donations. 
“Animal Crossing: New Horizons” 
seemed like the rare case of a video 
game being the target of incredible 
hype yet still managing to stick the 
landing on arrival.
Or was it too good to be true? After 
your island achieves a three star rat-
ing and the vagabond musician and 
series staple K. K. Slider comes to play 
a concert, Tom Nook finally gives you 
access to the much-anticipated terra-
forming features. Your entire island’s 
layout is now able to be modified to 
your liking, and with the right items 
you can entertain the possibility of 
urban side streets, medieval castles or 
even covering every possible inch of 
your island in water.
I mentioned before that it seemed 
like everyone and their mother was 
hankering to play “Animal Crossing: 
New Horizons,” and the numbers 
don’t lie: The game sold more than 

13 million copies in the first month 
or so, which is already more than the 
last entry in the series, “New Leaf,” 
sold in its entire lifetime. And since 
everyone is cooped up at home, and 
everyone has more time to waste on 
the internet, “Animal Crossing” has 
evolved from a popular but more 
niche life-simulator with communi-
ties housed on Reddit and Tumblr, to 
a mainstream trending topic that will 
pop up on your Facebook and Twitter 
feeds even if you don’t play the game. 
There were articles about how people 
were hosting birthday parties, gradu-
ation ceremonies and even work-
place meetings on their islands. The 
Detroit Lions underpaid an intern to 
make a seven minute video revealing 
their 2020 schedule using the game’s 
robust customization features and a 
little Photoshop.
It seems like an unwritten Internet 
rule that the more popular a piece of 
media becomes the more cutthroat 
and vocal its fans are. With “New Hori-
zons” the gatekeepers were on guard 
day one, as a war was waged between 
time travellers who wanted to make 
their island look as cool as possible as 
fast as possible and so-called “purists” 
who decried anything beyond taking 
the game one day at a time as “cheat-
ing.” Although I was an avid time trav-
eller in past games, I wanted to take 
the game slowly this time, especially 
since it would give me at least a tiny 
bit of structure as the vacuous days of 
quarantine began to morph together. 
No problem, right? Twitter told a dif-
ferent story. The purists labelled the 
time travellers as impatient babies 
who sucked all the fun out of the 
game. The time travellers brushed off 
the purists as the fun-police who were 
jealous of what they were already able 
to accomplish.
Regardless of the yelling, by the 
time I unlocked terraforming and 
could finally catch up to the time 
travellers the game started to feel 
more and more like a chore. Why 
even bother trying to make a grand 
outdoor entrance for my museum or 
a high-octane boxing ring when five 
other people on Twitter have already 
done it? For a game centered around 
themes of leisure and community, it’s 
amazing how toxic and selfish some 
of its fans had become. People would 
bully others for “stealing” their ideas 
for island design or charge ridiculous 
prices for the game’s rare items on 
the ironically-named online fan mar-
ketplace Nookazon. The concept of 
cheating in “Animal Crossing” is a silly 
oxymoron at best, but people were try-
ing their damndest to make it a com-
petition.

CASSANDRA DAWN
Daily Arts Writer

Read more at michigandaily.com

DIGITAL CULTURE NOTEBOOK
DIGITAL CULTURE NOTEBOOK

