All hail Nintendo's animal overlords | Opinion

All hail Nintendo's animal overlords | Opinion

Animal Crossing looks set to be one of the year's biggest games -- we might reflect on what it says about the appetite for different kinds of escapism

It’d be easy to dismiss the success of Animal Crossing: New Horizons as an accident of timing, simply the result of releasing just as the COVID-19 pandemic was kicking into gear - certainly it doesn’t hurt that the world needs that kind of gentle escapism now (even if Animal Crossing was never designed to be binge-played). Here, Rob Fahey argues that this is a clearly incorrect reading that dismisses the obvious value of and appetite for variety in gaming experiences beyond what the AAA industry typically offers up.

Tangentially, for what such a misreading looks like in hindsight, see the narratives around Myst. As I wrote before, “[G]aming has always had more subcultures than the social narrative has accounted for and when we refer to gaming as a monolith we distort reality by ignoring the experience and perspective of many, many people.”