You Can Do Anything in Animal Crossing Except Escape Productivity Dread

The NookPhone glows. I didn’t notice it until my brother-in-law visited my island. A classic Nintendo flourish: entirely unnecessary, but once noticed, immensely charming. It made me happy to see his character’s face lit up, smiling down at the little smartphone facsimile. His villager, designed by my nephew, looks like his son. But as he navigated his own personal menu for several seconds beyond my attention span, the initial burst of cuteness was displaced with a question: How had I missed this detail?

I’d lived a lot of my life in Animal Crossing: New Horizons over two weeks. Like many people, I treat the release of a new Animal Crossing with a religious reverence. Since the series first entered my life, back when I was twelve, carefree, and lacking any appreciation for the merits of an interest-free, pay-when-you-can mortgage, I have treated each game as an audiovisual anti-anxiety bath. Compared to other franchises, the series makes so few demands of you, some people struggle to find the part that’s supposed to be a game. You’re simply dropped in a place with a bunch of chill animal neighbors, given a shovel and a fishing rod, and provided with some gentle suggestions of things you could do, if you wanted. It has next to no difficulty, and I adore it. Since the last installment, New Leaf, which I played unconscionably when its release coincided with a period of unemployment, I have awaited the next entry like Nook awaits your Bells: with equal parts patience and greed.

And, as your Twitter feed is likely bearing witness to, the game did not disappoint. We’re all in it now, even those who aren’t. We now live in a world where “What’s Animal Crossing?” becomes “Who’s got the best turnip prices rn?” in record time. As for me, it’s quickly become a part of my daily routine. As cliché as it’s become to say, I found myself needing this game in a way I could have never accounted for, even with all my years of fanboying.

And yet the NookPhone’s pale glow unnerved me. As my brother-in-law/nephew doppelgänger stood next to me in-game, head bopping while thumbing (can we call it thumbing?) through his twee faux-apps, I realized the NookPhone is a darker commodity than any of us give it credit for. Its very newness to the series caused me to overlook its effects on my behavior. Like any shiny new thing, I just wanted to love it.

*

I love a screen. Ask my wife. In the early days of our dating, we attempted “No Screen Nights,” which explain themselves. What didn’t explain themselves were my temper tantrums rivaling those of children. I grew sullen and resentful at the onset of these nights, which were supposed to be about connection. It always took me a good hour (or more honestly, two) to come around and enjoy disconnecting from the screens that dotted the apartment we then shared, which included: my TV, my laptop, my tablet, my phone, my smartwatch, and, the most precious of all, my Switch. Contrast that to her more minimalist approach (when I met her, she had a TV that was disconnected not only from any game console, but from the actual electrical socket), and it’s safe to say that some of our more formative arguments centered around my desire to encase my eyeballs in blue light whenever and however possible.

No Screen Nights never became a success, and it was my fault. I was too stubborn, and I never suggested or initiated them. But, even given my failings, they did ultimately help me to accept the reality of my habits. I began to (begrudgingly) recognize that, yes, maybe my anxiety would be lessened if I checked the news less frequently. Or perhaps logging onto Twitter as my very first cognitive act of the morning was not a way to set myself up for a happy and productive day. This was not a revelation, per se. I always knew I leaned on technology for my happiness. When it comes down to it, I am a materialist. Not much makes me happier than some new combination of silicon and screen.

Which is, I think, how Nook got me. I’m no stranger to being duped by this raccoon, mind you. When he handed me a tent to pitch, I understood that while the first taste is free, homeownership is not. Tom Nook is a master insinuator, a salesman who convinces you he’s not selling anything at all. But even so, after my first night in the tent, when he handed me a phone he claimed would make my life easier, I believed him. I believed him, even as I thumbed at my own, decidedly non-virtual phone while the game loaded the Resident Services tent, because belief has nothing to do with experience.

*

The NookPhone is, gameplay-wise, nothing more than a glorified menu system. If I must give it credit, I would say this: it cleverly literalizes something that most games treat as a casual breakage of the fourth wall. When you open a menu in a game, the spell being immersed in that world is broken. But you just accept that you are opening a menu because that is something you do in a game. Moreover, a menu is usually a quarantine zone for all of a game’s more tedious and fiddly actions. Where else are you going to look through tiny, sight-ruining text relating to the newest cuirass you’ve acquired? The menu, of course!

The NookPhone, then, is an attempt to bring this near necessity of game design into the game world as an object your character manipulates. It is, in the parlance of fiction workshops, keeping things ~in-scene~. It is hardly the first game to do so, but it may be the cutest. The NookPhone is undoubtedly more delightful than whatever phone you happen to have. This is just a fact.

But like everything in Animal Crossing—from the dystopian qualities of the overall narrative to the gifting of hamster cages to anthropomorphic hamsters—the cuteness is there to hide the thing that you’re actually doing. New Horizons pitches itself as a game about an island getaway, an escape from the everyday, a paradise soon to be found. But at least how I’ve been playing it, it’s probably more accurate to say it’s a game about our attachment to phones.

*

The first thing I do each day in Animal Crossing is check my NookPhone. My villager steps out of his house, surrounded by flowers swaying in the wind and a mailbox filled with things I purchased the day before. Bugs hop about him and the shadow of a fish is visible in the river in the background. A rock sits on the very edge of the rolling horizon, promising good things: minerals or outright cash. And yet, before I engage with any of that, I check my phone to see what the day’s NookMiles+ challenges are. I set about achieving these daily micro-goals as quickly as possible, pulling the NookPhone back out as soon as I hear the chime and feel the satisfying rumble of the controller. I check off that goal, get my points, view the next challenge, and set about achieving it.

The first thing I do each day in my biological life is check my iPhone. These days, it isn’t Twitter I turn to, but my daily checklist. I give myself credit for waking up, in order to feel like I’ve started the day accomplishing something, a practice I picked up from my wife. Check. I move on to feeding and walking the dog. Check. I make “Grayson’s kibble,” since my coffee beans sound a lot like dog food when they hit the measuring cup sitting atop the scale. Regretfully, I am that guy. (Check.) Showering is a productive thing to do, and so it too gets a check, before it’s on to the real meat of the day: whatever it is I need to accomplish for my jobs. Hell, even Animal Crossing has shown up on this list in recent weeks. After I’m done virtually checking things off, I give myself a meta-check. It feels like an old Xzibit meme: I heard you like checking things off, so we checked things off for having checked things off.

I know that there’s nothing inherently wrong with either practice. To begin with Animal Crossing, the behavior I’m describing is undoubtedly what the developers intended the player to feel. I’m sure many people disliked the more intangible goals of earlier entries, and so they wanted to add some bite-sized accomplishments to keep players chirping along toward the bigger things (re: unending mortgaging). It’s a smart design choice: more immediately rewarding, but also entirely ignorable, if you so choose.

But I am the hamster to whom you give the hamster cage. I am Hamlet (or if I’m being more honest, Rodney), cheering you for having gifted me something that represents my mental and emotional captivity. The checklists are both the reliever and perpetuator of my anxiety. For every item I check off, there are others yet to be done. For everything left undone, I am undone with worry. Did I do enough today? Could I have done more?

For every item I check off, there are others yet to be done. For everything left undone, I am undone with worry. Did I do enough today? Could I have done more?

The same feeling has infiltrated my experience of Animal Crossing. Twitter has become a testament to the achievements of strangers. While it is undoubtedly joyful to see what others have done with their island—their cliff-side mansions, their cute af playgrounds—one can’t help but feel behind. It took me two-and-a-half weeks to even encounter Wisp. My house is a visual travesty, especially since the advent of my Bunny Room. And, worst of all, I have not yet constructed the giant mech, nor customized him to suit my color preferences.

All this combines and snowballs into a familiar feeling of productivity dread. The NookPhone, godforsaken Twitter, and my own Lapsed Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

*

But this is not the only way to play the game. Another night, I visited Nasturtia, a college friend’s island. When you visit another person’s place, the camera pans over a section of their land as your plane approaches touchdown. As the plane descended, I saw flowers. Lots and lots of flowers. More flowers than I, in my eighteen years of playing various Animal Crossing games, ever thought to plant.

As I touched down, I tread forward into a land that looked less like the rurality I associated with the game, even with its tropical trappings, and more like an untamed forest. Their villager, too, looked like something out of Princess Mononoke: green hair, leafy splotches slashed across their face, and a backpack made of twigs. I felt like I’d not only traveled to another island, but another game entirely. The feeling only compounded as they took me to the highest point of their island. There, they were growing new flower varietals in their test garden, as they called it. A careful arrangement of flowers dotted the narrow path, and I was cautioned not to run in order not to risk hurting any of the buds. I would never, I said. Quite the opposite: I wanted to walk through this space as slowly as I could.

As I said to my friend that night, it never occurred to me to play Animal Crossing this way. But once I’d seen it, it was so obvious and beautiful. Of course, I said over FaceTime audio. Of course you can play the game like this. I love it. I love it so much.

*

After we toured the rest of their island, they gifted me with a few new flower types before I left. There were some I couldn’t take, because they were too precious to them, having only just come in. Once they properly propagated, however, I could take some home. Indeed, they might even mail me some. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that I felt like I could cry for joy in this moment. There was something inherently beautiful about seeing the game played in a way that ran so counter to my own capitalistic approach.

They’d always wanted to garden, my friend said. But in cramped San Francisco, the opportunity never arose. Until now. Nasturtia, digital or no, was their garden. And what a perfect garden it was. The tulips that now grow on my island will always be theirs, I feel. A little wildness on an island where checklists and progression rule the roost.

*

I can’t blame the NookPhone for my sorrows. I do think it was designed to promote the kind of rapid accomplishments that dominate the mentalities of MMOs and workplaces. But like everything in Animal Crossing, if I don’t want to do it, I don’t have to do it. At the end of the day, I choose my checklists. I choose to chase that feeling of doing, doing, doing.

I never noticed the glow of the NookPhone because I’m always looking at the menu, never at my villager. Whether it’s Animal Crossing or my working life, I am perpetually caught up in the next sequential thing. When I finish writing this essay, I will check Write off my list. No one is going to give me Nook Miles for the effort, but I will still feel that twinge of happiness. I produced something. I was productive.

I’m not about to start growing flowers, in Animal Crossing or in life. But I do have a dog now. My wife and I planned to adopt one for some time, and we recently did just that. Of our shared dogly duties, I’ve taken up training her to walk on a leash. Our first days weren’t great. She tugged at every possible venture and couldn’t go further than around the block before I deemed the exercise unfruitful. But then I got a clicker and stuffed her mouth with treats while pressing its button to teach her that good things come when you hear a click. Next, I walked around our backyard, calling her to my side, clicking and treating whenever she came and walked beside me. That activity then transitioned to our walks, which, thanks to some YouTube tutorials, are now going much, much better, even within the span of a week and a half of her entering our lives.

I take a lot of pride in her newfound abilities to walk without tugging (much). She also takes a lot of pride in it, which is adorable. Notably, none of this work has appeared on my checklists. The little milestones—not barking at every neighbor walking by, learning not to pee in the house, keeping it moving while a squirrel taunts her—are not the things of to-dos. They are happy accomplishments come about organically. They remind me of the original Animal Crossing, which, like many early games in beloved series, lacks the systemic sophistication of later games but retains the central feeling that enamored enough players to merit a sequel. In the original Animal Crossing, there was no NookPhone. There was no customization for your town. It was more or less you and your expanding house, with the occasional errand for your town’s residents. You would fall into a simple routine of catching fish and bugs, hitting rocks, and digging up fossils. It was all very quiet. But then you’d catch a coelacanth. Who knew you could catch a coelacanth? And who knew what a coelacanth was in the first place? You will treasure the accomplishment even more (and retain the spelling of coelacanth as you near your thirtieth birthday), simply because no one told you to do it. Twitter does not exist, and the internet is kind of shabby. EGM maybe has something about it, but the latest issue is upstairs, next to the toilet. Right now, it’s just you and the thing you didn’t know you could do.

As I walk our dog through the cemetery near our house, I quietly celebrate her ability to ignore a stagnant puddle of rainwater. She has done something good, and something I couldn’t have accounted for in my listing, even if I’d tried. And then we keep it moving, toward the next unaccountable thing.

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