One of the most challenging projects in the game is paying off the mortgage on one’s house. Animal Crossing allows players to upgrade their homes, but doing so requires paying off a large note the player must take out to start the game in the first place. Then the player must pay renovation mortgages for even larger sums. While the game mercifully omits some of the more punitive intricacies of long-term debt, such as compounding interest, improving one’s home does require consistent work in the game world. Catching fish, hunting for fossils, finding insects, and doing jobs for other townsfolk all produce income that can be used to pay off mortgage debt—or to buy carpets, furniture, and objects to decorate one’s house.
Animal Crossing, by Ian.. I played it for months back in 2006 when it came out on the Nintendo DS. Soothing. But not that part. What was great to me was the connection with real time and the fact that I would just hang out on the beach.
I don’t get the collect/consume design in games. It’s dull and pointless, doesn’t make me learn anything, doesn’t make me feel smart, doesn’t make me feel good except for a short amount of time between the previous grind and before the next one.
I’m always impressed how a cute style, curvy and funny characters can make you grind like a bitch in hell.
I know about different gameplay style, Keirsey Temperament, GNS Theory and all that but like I wrote three years ago, we need to step up and make moves as designers: yes, we want to make people feel good and smart. No, we don’t want them to spend hundreds of hours collecting things regardless, because it is not a behavior we want to teach. It’s not an ideal we want to spread out. We have already too much of that.
Ian suggests that it’s part of AC’s game design, to make you realize this: Animal Crossing can be seen as a critique of contemporary consumer culture that attempts to persuade the player to understand both the intoxication of material acquisition and the subtle pleasures of abstention. I think it makes you act like a collector and, that’s all there is to me. The consequences of what you do with your collection of stuff are totally secondary. The main course is collecting and chilling. I don’t need to play any other AC.