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The Quiet Revolution of Animal Crossing

theatlantic.com

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Re: The Quiet Revolution of Animal Crossing

#51

Post by dx87 »

moron4hire wrote: post #27

I have a lot of friends playing the game and it just looks like all the worst features of grinding through an MMORPG with the only paid being "look at this village I put together". I've generally quit playing any games that involve grinding. Which means I've mostly quit playing games, especially in Mobile, as they pretty much all involved grinding of some kind, even the action games. It's depressing how samey the gam…

My wife has been playing it quite a bit, and it seems like it's only grindy if you want it to be. My wife spends most of her time making gardens, decorating rooms, and exploring new islands. Some of her friends have ugly islands full of weeds, cluttered houses, etc, but they have tons of money, even though they don't need it. I think it's a game that is whatever you make of it.

Re: The Quiet Revolution of Animal Crossing

#52

Post by Uhhrrr »

empath75 wrote: post #40
rgoulter wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thesis of the article """I had imagined Animal Crossing to be a game about the world, one that offered ingenious, if abstract, life lessons. But the players enjoying it in quarantine celebrate it for escapism, which any form of entertainment might provide. Neither interpretation seems quite right. .... Instead, Animal Crossing is a political hypothesis about how a different kind of world might work—one with no lo…

Games express meaning whether the creators intend it or not.

One supposes, but with sufficient intellectual preparation, one can completely miss the meaning and instead dive deeply down a rabbit hole talking about how Pong expresses man's inhumanity to man.

Re: The Quiet Revolution of Animal Crossing

#53

Post by anonytrary »

hyperpallium wrote: post #15
Trasmatta wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> less well known I don't know if I would call Stardew Valley "less well known", as it's sold over 10 million copies. It's incredibly popular, one of the biggest indie game success stories ever. I would also say Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley (and Harvest Moon, for that matter) and very different types of games (despite surface level similarities), so it's pretty hard to compare them directly like that.

> the Animal Crossing franchise has sold over 30 million units. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Crossing The inequality is legitimate.

It may be legitimate, but is it relevant enough to call one indie but not the other? I don't think so, since 30m and 10m are the same order of magnitude. Halo has roughly a similar ratio with COD, and both series are famous.

Re: The Quiet Revolution of Animal Crossing

#54

Post by ctchocula »

anonytrary wrote: post #53
hyperpallium wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the Animal Crossing franchise has sold over 30 million units. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Crossing The inequality is legitimate.

It may be legitimate, but is it relevant enough to call one indie but not the other? I don't think so, since 30m and 10m are the same order of magnitude. Halo has roughly a similar ratio with COD, and both series are famous.

Stardew Valley is indie, because it was made by a single developer who was responsible for everything from coding, composing the music, writing the story and the bitmap art. Animal Crossing is not indie, because it was made by a large studio.

Re: The Quiet Revolution of Animal Crossing

#55

Post by hombre_fatal »

Analemma_ wrote: post #4
Trasmatta wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That quote was from Frank Lantz, who is the guy who designed Universal Paperclips. There's a bit of irony about the criticism of repetition, coming from someone who designed a game about clicking buttons over and over to make numbers go up. Disclaimer: I actually think Universal Paperclips is brilliant, and agree that Animal Crossing has a lot of overly tedious and unnecessary mechanics. But I don't think it's fair t…

Was Universal Paperclips supposed to be fun? I kind of got the impression it was meant to scare you into donating to MIRI or whatever.

"Idle games" are one of the recent booms in gaming over the last five or so years. They now even have their own section on Kongregate and are a large mobile gaming category.

Re: The Quiet Revolution of Animal Crossing

#56

Post by mcphage »

dx87 wrote: post #45
mcphage wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Full respect to the author, and I'm sure they knew exactly how contrarian they were being. Yes, Ian Bogost is a respected game designer and developer.

Has he released anything that ever had any success? I just looked on his Wikipedia page, and it looks like he primarily does contract game development as a way to advertise for different political groups. Here's an excerpt from his his studio's website about the themes for some of his games. airport security, consumer debt disaffected workers, pandemic flu tort reform, suburban errands data compression, the petroleum…

Cow Clicker: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker

Re: The Quiet Revolution of Animal Crossing

#57

Post by SimeVidas »

lawrenceyan wrote: post #11

It's kind of funny that they titled the article this way considering the fact that Animal Crossing is currently banned in China because people have been using it as a platform to stage the Hong Kong protests online [1]. I suppose it gives 'quiet revolution' a doubly apt connotation. [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52269671

It’s not banned. It’s just removed from the big online stores in China. You can still buy it, just not as easily.

Re: The Quiet Revolution of Animal Crossing

#58

Post by rdlw »

rgoulter wrote: post #31
Uhhrrr wrote: post #14

Why does he go on and on about whether the game accurately represents modern life? It seems like this misses the point of games in general, and a game for pre-teens about talking animals specifically.

The thesis of the article """I had imagined Animal Crossing to be a game about the world, one that offered ingenious, if abstract, life lessons. But the players enjoying it in quarantine celebrate it for escapism, which any form of entertainment might provide. Neither interpretation seems quite right. .... Instead, Animal Crossing is a political hypothesis about how a different kind of world might work—one with no lo…

> ...I think something relaxed like Animal Crossing somewhat undermines "games are a serious artform"

It seems ludicrous to judge an artform entirely based on what you consider to be its least-worthy example. It's like seeing an episode of Friends and saying that television shows can't be serious art because they're just strings of cheap jokes or reading some smut and saying that a novel can't be about anything important.

For the record, I'm not entirely clear if the bit I quoted is your opinion or if it's meant to be the opinion of a hypothetical game developer who "make[s] serious games with serious messages to be taken seriously by serious people," but either way it rubs me the wrong way to a) discredit the medium based on a cherry-picked example and b) to claim that AC can't be a serious game or that it can't have a meaningful message because it isn't 'serious' enough.

> I don't think Animal Crossing is really trying to 'say' anything.

Maybe not anything as serious as the article tries to claim, but I think art with a simple, comforting message is just as important as art with a deeper message of social and political criticism. Playing the game makes me happy, which is something that seems to get ignored by the people who don't like it. The 'message' is that I can stop thinking about whatever problems I have for a few hours and do something simple and enjoyable.

Re: The Quiet Revolution of Animal Crossing

#59

Post by kibwen »

billfruit wrote: post #44

Kind of surprised they did not mention Stardew Valley, in the discussion. I kind of feel that Nintendo fanboyism pervades a large proportion of writing on games, but it would be better to be more objective.

I've played both, and I don't think we should be too quick to lump both games in together. The fundamental game loop of Stardew Valley is about deciding how best to expend your finite stamina and time with every in-game day (which are quite short in real time), with the soft goal of having "beaten" the game by the first day of the third in-game year. Meanwhile in Animal Crossing, its real-time nature mandates patience and the lack of stamina permits leisurely play, and there's no pressure to ever achieve anything by any date.

Honestly, I don't like calling Animal Crossing a "game", because that's kind of inaccurate. Just like some "video games" are more like movies, and some are more like books, and some are more like roller coasters, Animal Crossing is more like a little garden to which you can tend.

If anything, I might compare Animal Crossing to a game of Minecraft on Peaceful Survival mode before I'd compare it to Stardew Valley.

Re: The Quiet Revolution of Animal Crossing

#60

Post by tasogare »

billfruit wrote: post #44

Kind of surprised they did not mention Stardew Valley, in the discussion. I kind of feel that Nintendo fanboyism pervades a large proportion of writing on games, but it would be better to be more objective.

Same here. From what I saw from videos about the new AC and my experience with the mobile game, the game doesn’t seem as fun or interesting as SdV. Just pure grind, without interesting variations (and I don’t care about collectibles). The Gamecube version is looking more appealing because the town is already established, so you have to discover and interact with the world instead of starting from a generic empty island.

There is also a big difference in tag price. For the price of AC I could SdV on three platforms, or buy copies for friends to play with me (I did that once).

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