Animal Crossing – A New Social Media?
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/04/16/999944/coronavirus-animal-crossing-video-games-social-media/
Animal Crossing: New Horizons was released on the Nintendo Switch back in March, and has since sold over 22 million copies. The game came out just as the coronavirus pandemic was having widespread impacts across the United States, people began quarantining, schools were moving online, and other activities were cancelled. If you’re unfamiliar with the game, the main premise is that you have your own fully customizable virtual island where you have your own home and can house up to 10 other NPC villagers, out of a total selection of roughly 460. Other features include creating your own clothing, customizing furniture, building cliffs and rivers, gardening, investing in the turnip stalk market, and visiting friends’ and strangers’ islands. This social aspect of the game is perhaps the most interesting under the current conditions. In a time when many people are not going outside to hang out with people in person, this article discusses how Animal Crossing has become its own social network.
There a couple ways you can network with others in Animal Crossing. If you have friends with the game, you can share friend codes, and go to each other’s islands to explore or shop. There is another feature called “Dodo Codes” where anyone can post their island’s code, and anyone with the code can visit the island and roam around with the stranger’s character. More recently, another feature has been added where users can upload their islands to a sort of cloud, and then players can view other islands on the cloud while the owner is not even there. You can also add a player as either a friend or best friend, and send messages or mail whenever you want. These relationships can be seen as building a social network, perhaps with strong ties between your friends or best friends, and weak ties between those whose island you just visit casually through codes or the cloud storage. These relationships are unique in the pandemic times, where you can now virtually interact with someone, visit their home, share gifts, and explore together, which can retain current relationships and foster new ones.
You could also view how these networks operate through a few other in-game functions. For instance, each island is given a “native fruit” at the start of the game, which is randomized from 5 options. The only way to get the other fruit options are through your friends who might have been given a different fruit, or an in-game feature to go to randomly-generated island, where you have a relatively low chance of getting a new fruit. Here, the game fosters mutually-beneficial relationships to share unique items. This almost mirrors the concept discussed in class, where people tend to get career offers from acquaintances rather than close friends. If your best friends don’t have a fruit that you want but a friend-of-a-friend or a stranger has it, it is beneficial for you to form that relationship. Other features encourage similar relationships: players in northern/southern hemispheres have different seasonal events and items, and the turnip market prices vary from island-to island.
Overall, Animal Crossing has proven to be a new way of creating social networks in the past few months, and may continue to add features to encourage further social interactions.