The Last Word On Nothing

The world feels more dizzying every day. Last weekend, I sat in front of my computer, scrolling through article after article detailing massive societal problems: police brutality and system racism; this pandemic; another pandemic brewing in pigs?; rising sea levels; corrupt government officials and what appears to be the sun setting on democracy. Welp, I thought, that’s enough internet for today. And I got up to spend hours staring at a different device: a Nintendo Switch.

I do not consider myself a video game person but in the last two months, I’ve been spending hours each week playing a game called Animal Crossing. If you haven’t played the game, the gist is essentially that you create a little avatar and you live on a completely self-sufficient island. There is no way to win or lose, and you can spend your time doing whatever you want. It’s the one bit of consistency and dependability in my life right now; the animation is adorable, the music is soothing, the relationship between cause and effect is predictable. You chop a tree? Three pieces of wood come out. (Wood is an renewable resource in the Animal Crossing universe; you can chop three pieces of wood from each tree, every day, with no consequences.) And unlike in the real world, I can go out without a mask, and try on clothes at a store. It’s a universe where you can catch fish and insects, pick fruit from trees, and collect seashells on the beach.

Yet I find myself wondering if there’s something wrong with me because I can’t fully enjoy the game without poking holes in the ethics and morality of the Animal Crossing universe. Even in this escapist world, I can’t escape my own brain; by real-world standards, my island has major flaws. For one, the game encourages a hedonistic treadmill of consumption; it incentivizes flying (! think of the carbon footprint!) to other islands to pilfer its resources and create a barren ecosystem. What about deforestation? Over fishing? Massive insect die-offs? They don’t exist in the game, of course, but I still can’t help but feel guilty about contributing to this non-existent problem.

And then there’s the questionable ethics of Blathers, a chatty owl who runs your island’s museum. The museum has a collection of aquatic life, insects, fossils, and stolen art (this is a whole other thing I will not get into, but if you play the game, you know Redd is sketch city). Blathers encourages you to bring him all new species you collect on the island, and as the writer Emma Marris has pointed out before, many of those species are protected from international trade. Blathers only accepts one example per species and you can unload the rest on your island’s store — which would be illegal in the real world. I now think about this every time I sell coral or turtles in exchange for “bells,” the island’s currency. Sure, I’m profiting, but at whose expense?

The game also allows you to take on massive construction projects, like adding bridges and stairs or even building new cliffs and rearranging waterways. You can dig up trees at your pleasure, and pave it over with stone. None of this requires environmental review, of course.

Perhaps most troubling are the interactions with your villagers. Other anthropomorphized animals live on your island — you are the only human, for some reason — and you often are rewarded for talking with them by points in the game or with “presents” from these “friends.” I find myself feeling weirdly bad about this; can’t we find joy in each other’s company without transaction? Even worse, there’s no way to say “thank you” after receiving a gift. Instead, I try to show my appreciation for villagers by planting nice flowers around their house and giving them thoughtful gifts I think they’ll actually like. (I feel ridiculous typing this out, by the way, because I never consciously realized I carried this strange guilt until now.) The best gift they’ve given me so far is adopting an island-wide nickname for me: they are all, for reasons I do not understand, calling me “Professor Pie.” This little token of affection means more to me than is reasonable for something that’s obviously AI-generated.

This weekend, the game plans to release an update that allows players to go swimming in the oceans around their island. We’ll get to collect items from the ocean floor and interact with an otter! But I’m already bracing for all the holes my brain will poke in this comparatively pleasant alternate universe.