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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
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