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