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The Quiet Revolution of Animal Crossing

theatlantic.com

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Re: The Quiet Revolution of Animal Crossing

#81

Post by Polylactic_acid »

bschwindHN wrote: post #77
kosievdmerwe wrote: post #64

OK I skimmed through the article and I can't say I much care for it. To me Animal Crossing is a game that you play over many months to sometimes relax doing something mindless or over the longer term to have an island and house that you slowly build up in your own way. With that in mind there are a lot of great things in animal crossing. A lot of the furniture has interesting interactions and the museum is just a bea…

> The lest said about the online play the better. Heh, Nintendo is simply incapable or unwilling to produce a quality online experience. I don't know why. They created a masterpiece with Smash Ultimate but then did a huge disservice to themselves and the game by slapping on a really shitty online mode. Obviously it doesn't impact sales and that's likely what drives their decisions, but it's still so disappointing.

I wonder why they always put so little effort in. I know at least part of the reason is that nintendo wants to make an entirely child friendly experience which usually involves leaving as little player to player interaction as possible.

Re: The Quiet Revolution of Animal Crossing

#82

Post by watwut »

causality0 wrote: post #17
voz_ wrote: post #10

It is a rather poor game all things considered. Stardew valley is far better. On the whole, the one thing they needed to nail is co-op, and that is probably the thing they did the worst on. The game features are limited, villager interaction is inane, the items are repetitive, the goals non-existent. I understand the simple joy of a no-pressure game, but without a meaningful reward loop of any kind, the whole thing s…

It's not really a "game" at all. There's no failure state. It's an interactive experience that brings joy to millions of people, and that's enough.

Game does not need to have fail state. Children's games often don't have fail states and were called games long before.

Re: The Quiet Revolution of Animal Crossing

#83

Post by twomoretime »

>Animal Crossing serves up unexpected consolation by offering surrogate habits—a structured, if fictional, alternative to normal life

I think this speaks to the sorry state of our society when the majority of Americans are apparently unable to give meaningful structure to their lives. We don't seem to prioritize non-physical self improvement in this country.

Re: The Quiet Revolution of Animal Crossing

#84

Post by andrewzah »

mcphage wrote: post #56
dx87 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> The game serves as a deconstructive satire of social games

> The goal of the game is to earn "clicks" by clicking on a sprite of a cow every six hours. [...] A premium currency known as "Mooney" allows the user to purchase different cow designs and skip the six-hour interval between clicks.

This doesn't really sound "successful" in the traditional sense.

Re: The Quiet Revolution of Animal Crossing

#85

Post by tikhonj »

danbolt wrote: post #48

I've seen a lot of comments or responses from people saying that Animal Crossing's mechanics are unfulfilling or "pointless", but I think they're missing the spirit of what makes them enjoyable to a lot of people. I'm going to posit that a video game is the three following things, but you're welcome to disagree: 1) a player performs some sort of input into a game 2) the game responds with some sort of audiovisual phe…

I like this definition, because it lets me think of pressing a button to get a walk signal to cross the street as a video game. Makes the walk home more satisfying.

I'm not even being 100% facile—I used to think about this on the way home from Bart before I stopped taking Bart thanks to the quarantine.

Re: The Quiet Revolution of Animal Crossing

#86

Post by ccktlmazeltov »

danbolt wrote: post #48

I've seen a lot of comments or responses from people saying that Animal Crossing's mechanics are unfulfilling or "pointless", but I think they're missing the spirit of what makes them enjoyable to a lot of people. I'm going to posit that a video game is the three following things, but you're welcome to disagree: 1) a player performs some sort of input into a game 2) the game responds with some sort of audiovisual phe…

urr... that sounds like a very simple reduction from someone who does not play video games.

There are MANY types of games and they provide different types of pleasure.

For example multiplayer games usually bring pleasure through cooperation, socializing, and becoming better.

sandbox games like minecraft can provide pleasure through creation.

other video games like the last of us are just deeply emotional and touching through story telling

etc.

Re: The Quiet Revolution of Animal Crossing

#87

Post by a_e_k »

Animal Crossing seemed like a game that my kids might really enjoy relaxing with and I was prepared to pop for it on the launch day. Reading about the one-island-per-Switch and primary vs. secondary users thing kind of killed our interest in it, however. None of them wants to (or should have to) settle for second fiddle. Seems like a really odd oversight for a company that tries so hard to be family-oriented.

Re: The Quiet Revolution of Animal Crossing

#88

Post by jholman »

anonytrary wrote: post #69
ctchocula wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I see, I guess we had different definitions of "indie", but I think what you said sounds reasonable and there is value to understanding the humble origins of someone regardless of their current standing.

Without wanting to police the word, because you do you, "indie" comes from "independent", as in "independent of a publisher" (or, in music, where the word comes from, independent of a record label).

It doesn't have to be from a single developer, or even a small dev team, but rather from a team that is in some meaningful sense "independent".

This means, as an interesting example, that Minecraft was at one point about as indie as it is possible to be, and now is about as not-indie as it is possible to be.

Re: The Quiet Revolution of Animal Crossing

#89

Post by kosievdmerwe »

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #81
bschwindHN wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The lest said about the online play the better. Heh, Nintendo is simply incapable or unwilling to produce a quality online experience. I don't know why. They created a masterpiece with Smash Ultimate but then did a huge disservice to themselves and the game by slapping on a really shitty online mode. Obviously it doesn't impact sales and that's likely what drives their decisions, but it's still so disappointing.

I wonder why they always put so little effort in. I know at least part of the reason is that nintendo wants to make an entirely child friendly experience which usually involves leaving as little player to player interaction as possible.

AC's online experience sucks in large part because Nintendo is paranoid about item duping. This leads to things like everyone needing to pause their gameplay so the save states can be in sync when someone visits and worse rolling back the state of the world if someone disconnects due to bad internet or their console going sleep due to inactivity.

Given the nature of the game I don't understand why they didn't prioritize fun over protecting against duping.

That's nevermind the fact that two friends can't do stuff like terraform or furnish an island together.

Re: The Quiet Revolution of Animal Crossing

#90

Post by kosievdmerwe »

wincy wrote: post #71
kosievdmerwe wrote: post #64

OK I skimmed through the article and I can't say I much care for it. To me Animal Crossing is a game that you play over many months to sometimes relax doing something mindless or over the longer term to have an island and house that you slowly build up in your own way. With that in mind there are a lot of great things in animal crossing. A lot of the furniture has interesting interactions and the museum is just a bea…

My five year old daughter has a villager and decorates her house. I think the enhancements that would make the game easier for adults would make it harder for young children to grasp. She doesn’t accidentally buy 500 stacks of flowers then cry because her bells are gone.

Good point, still makes no difference with regards to bait crafting, but at least it's a good reason for the shop not having free-form shopping.
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