I like how Tokyo RPG Factory had everyone thinking their deal was “RPGs in the style of SNES-era classics” but it turned out their deal was “RPGs about how people cope with pain, loss, and death.”

Sometimes I get a song stuck in my head and spend a couple of days trying to identify it only to realize it’s, like, the pause menu music from a game I played seven years ago.

I’ve written a few times about the idea that a lot of debates about game design actually come down to poorly-understood differences in how our brains are actually wired. I think I’ve found another example.

Games often ask the player to context-switch - to go from one type of task to another with different relevant considerations. But there’s a difference between context-switching because you finished a task and doing so because you were interrupted.

Suppose you’re playing a dungeon crawler or looter shooter or something where you fight your way through a dungeon and return to town to sort/sell/upgrade the loot you earn. These are different experiences - combat and exploration, followed by upkeep and optimization. They require you to focus on different things. Which parts of the dungeon you’ve explored and how much ammo and health you have left matter a lot in the dungeon, but back in town you’re concerned more with stats and currency.

If you finish the dungeon and then go back to town to sell, you can safely stop thinking about the dungeon’s concerns. They need no longer take up any mental resources. But if you are partway through the dungeon and then need to return to town because your inventory is full, you aren’t done worrying about which parts of the dungeon you’ve explored and how many enemies remain. You can’t forget about those things even as you must start focusing on equipment and currency instead for a while. They’re just temporarily on hold, like a mental equivalent of leaving a bunch of browser tabs open as you switch to something else as opposed to finishing a project and closing them all.

For some players (whom I shall tentatively call “multitaskers”) this is fine. For others (tentatively “focusers”) this can be deeply unpleasant. A focuser doesn’t like holding context in background memory. It’s difficult and distracting.

This is why when Torchlight adds the ability for you to send your pet back to town to sell things without having to leave the dungeon yourself like you have to in Diablo, some players love that this keeps you in the action while others lament that this disrupts pacing and removes breaks. If leaving the action means you’re preoccupied with an unfinished task the whole time, it’s not much of a break at all!

I am a focuser, and much like the fact that I am a completionist this has a significant effect on how I feel about certain game design choices. In fact, I think they’re connected - there’s a lot of overlap here with my claim that completionists feel anxiety about tracking long-term objectives. Both a focuser and a completionist as I’ve described them want things like a quest log or map icons to keep track of those objectives so that the player doesn’t have to keep them in background memory - if that task can be offloaded because it’s written down somewhere and automatically updated, then the player doesn’t have to spend continual mental resources on it. They can close the mental browser tabs.

As implied above, I think this is also a big part of why I dislike inventory limits that interrupt you with sudden mandatory inventory management, which has turned me off several games over the years.

And it’s likely also connected to my general dislike of punishment, particularly of the “you died on the boss so replay the level” variety. I want to immediately retry whatever it was I failed on, because holding the details of that challenge in my head while I fight my way back through other challenges is frustrating and unpleasant. The need to do so has also turned me off of a number of games over the years.

In the version 1.2.0 update for Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the interest earned on banked bells was drastically reduced - per Kotaku, “[t]he previous rate was estimated at around 0.5%. Now it appears to be closer to 0.05%, with interest payouts capped at 9,999 bells.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Nintendo isn’t being especially transparent about this. The in-game notification doesn’t even say what the interest rate used to be or what it is now, and there has been no public statement about why the change was made. In the absence of any other explanation and with Nintendo’s established patterns, the natural assumption is that the change is intended to handicap “time traveling.” Players who mess with their Switch’s internal calendar in order to earn a bunch of bells quickly through accumulated interest will now only earn about a tenth as much.

Like most cases of forcing a playstyle, this strikes me as misguided. Making this method earn money more slowly isn’t going to make playing without time travel more appealing. Players who time travel are already opting out of the way Nintendo wants them to play - now they just have to go through more tedious steps to play the way they actually want to play. Meanwhile, the players who aren’t time traveling are also punished by this change, with one of the game’s approved methods for earning bells being reduced in effectiveness by ninety percent! If anything, this change punishes the people playing the “right” way worse than it punishes the time travelers!

It’s a small thing in the grand scheme - from money rocks and money trees alone, you can easily earn tens of thousands of bells per day of actual play. But it bothers me that Nintendo would - apparently - hobble one of the game’s many fun details in an attempt to punish people for enjoying it “incorrectly” and as a result make things a little bit worse for everyone.

Does anyone else find it weird in Animal Crossing how much harder fishing is than, like, anything else?

Even videogamedunkey pointed this out.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot because the mechanics are pretty simple and on paper it’s not obvious that fishing would be more difficult or frustrating than, say, catching bugs. But there actually are several key differences.

First is that unlike bugs, which you can see before deciding to try to catch them, you can never be sure what kind of fish you’re trying to hook. It’s limited to some varieties by time and location, but beyond that all you have to go on is its rough size. You can run past the bugs you don’t need and only target the ones you’re specifically looking for, but if you’re looking for a specific fish you have to go for any shadow of the right size in the right place at the right time, with no guarantee that it’s the one you need - or even a fish, as it can turn out to be trash instead (or, during the Bunny Day event, a candy egg). So even if you succeed at the actual fishing challenge, you might not get the reward you want. And any fish that gets away might have been your one chance at the rare fish you’re seeking.

Next is the first stage of the actual challenge: getting the fish’s attention. Using the fishing pole casts the bobber out a set distance in front of you, and this can be bizarrely hard to aim. You don’t get any control over where it goes besides pointing your character in a direction, which can be difficult to do with precision. Fish have a surprisingly small area that they pay attention to and they can move around and reorient randomly. As a result, you may have to cast several times to actually get noticed - many times, I’ve cast my bobber only to have the fish turn around while the bobber was in midair. But you have to be careful about reeling the bobber in for a recast - if you do it when the fish actually had noticed it, the fish vanishes.

Finally comes the main challenge: reeling in the fish. The fish will nibble at the bobber zero to four times and then bite it. If you pull the line in any time before the bite, you lose the fish. Once they bite, you have a short window to pull the line in - hit the button too late, and you lose the fish. The window might be shorter for more rare fish, but in New Horizons you can’t tell from the shadow whether the fish is rare so you must treat every fish as rare. Either way, it’s a shorter window with less player control than almost anything else in the game - the only other thing I can really point to is dealing with wasps, but those have multiple mitigating factors (if you’re trying to catch them, you get several chances a day; if you fail to avoid them you can just take medicine which is easily acquired).

Fishing, like catching bugs, is one of the most prominent activities that you’re generally expected to do every day. It’s really odd to me how much harder and more frustrating fishing is than all the other prominent activities.

I wrote recently about dividing gamers into “completionists” who want to master a game and not miss anything and “wanderers” who want to explore a game and find surprises. Game designs can be good for one group and bad for the other, or can try to find compromises.

Animal Crossing is very much designed to appeal to wanderers, to the point where it almost comes across as purposefully trolling the completionists.

Animal Crossing wants you to slow down and relax. It isn’t designed to be binged - it doles out mechanics slowly, limits what you can do in a day, and adds in overnight delays to encourage you to come back tomorrow. The game actively resists players who want to power through its content, offering its best experiences to those who just check in for a while once or twice a day.

And that’s fine, even if it’s not how I normally play games since I like to progress on my own schedule, not someone else’s. I have to remember to get in the right headspace for the game, but then I can have a good time. The problem is that Animal Crossing also has several mechanics that make it very hard to stay in that headspace.

If you’re a wanderer who naturally approaches games in a relaxed, open-ended way - then you’re fine. But if you’re a goal-oriented completionist then Animal Crossing is actually a bit of a minefield, primarily through having checklists of goals with time-limited availability. Such as the stringfish.

See, there’s quite a variety of fish you can find in Animal Crossing. They vary by time of year, by time of day, by body of water, and sometimes by weather. On top of that, they have varying levels of rarity. The stringfish, for example, can only be found from December to March, from 4 pm to 9 am, in elevated rivers, and even then it’s quite rare. You can do everything right - stock up on fish bait (which is tedious, as you must hunt manila clams and then craft them into bait one at a time), head to a clifftop river at the right time of day during the right month, catch dozens or even hundreds of fish, managing your limited inventory and breaking fishing poles along the way, and never get a stringfish.

It might seem clear that this is the wrong way to play. It means a lot of time spent doing things that are tedious and stressful instead of relaxing. Clearly it would be better to just do some fishing here and there when you’re in the mood, and if/when you finally do catch the stringfish it’s a pleasant surprise.

Except. EXCEPT. There’s a museum. The museum lets you donate one of every fish, bug, and fossil you can find, displays them in somewhat spectacular fashion, and rewards you for completing a collection. The museum turns fish into a checklist and stringfish is absolutely on that list. And Animal Crossing released on March 20, less than two weeks before stringfish became unavailable for nine months. Is it any wonder that some players felt pushed to try hard to get the stringfish before the month ended - and then felt aggravated when they put in a lot of time and effort and still didn’t get the damn fish?

This is my problem with Animal Crossing. It provides experiences that are best enjoyed in a wanderer-style way, and then includes mechanics that encourage completionists to approach the game in a very different way that’s much less enjoyable. It’s sort of the completionist’s fault that they are playing the game wrong, and it will especially seem this way to wanderers who fall naturally into the better ways to play. But the game could do a lot more to lead more kinds of players into its best experiences.

Here’s another example that’s new to New Horizons: tool durability. When building most tools (shovel, fishing pole, bug net, etc.) you first have to build a “flimsy” version from common materials. This version is only good for a small number of uses before it breaks. You can also build a normal version of the tool, which takes the flimsy version and a slightly rarer material. This version lasts many more uses.

Here’s the thing, though - going from the flimsy to the normal version doesn’t add uses. It sets them to a higher number. That means that the most efficient use of your materials is to use the flimsy version almost enough to break it and then upgrade it to the normal version.

That’s already a kind of obnoxious thing to do, but on top of that tools don’t have a visible durability meter. So if you do want to optimize this, you have to learn how many uses a tool has and then keep count per tool. Undercount and use it too many times before upgrading and it’ll break instead; overcount and upgrade early and you’re missing on potential uses - either way, you waste crafting time and materials.

Now, I think it’s fair to argue that you aren’t supposed to try to optimize this way. Many players will just craft the flimsy version and the upgrade in one go and not worry about the “wasted” uses and probably have a better experience. But here’s the thing - the game could have easily catered to both types of players. If the upgrade added uses instead of resetting them, it would always be correct to just go straight for the upgrade and all the players would have the better experience.

By not approaching its design in this way - by not setting things up so that the mechanically optimal way to play is also the most enjoyable way to play - Animal Crossing is actively setting traps for players who want to optimize. The game is designed to be maximally enjoyable if you approach it as a relaxed experience but has mechanics that cause certain kinds of players to not be relaxed.