2021 •
Coconuts, Custom-Play & COVID-19: Social Isolation, Serious Leisure and Personas in Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Authors:
Chris Comerford
Abstract:
This paper discusses Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ (ACNH) release during the COVID-19 pandemic. A combination of the game’s elements, including its comforting aesthetic, participatory community, financial mechanics and goal-setting, promotes the player’s construction of their sense of self and provides crucial stability during the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. In contrast to other life simulator games such as The Sims, the timing of ACNH’s release makes its substitution efforts more adoptable by a wide spectrum of players between casual and (...)
This paper discusses Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ (ACNH) release during the COVID-19 pandemic. A combination of the game’s elements, including its comforting aesthetic, participatory community, financial mechanics and goal-setting, promotes the player’s construction of their sense of self and provides crucial stability during the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. In contrast to other life simulator games such as The Sims, the timing of ACNH’s release makes its substitution efforts more adoptable by a wide spectrum of players between casual and hardcore sensibilities. Moreover, the game serves those players as a partial substitute for complex face-to-face interactions during self-isolation. Concurrently, the game’s offer of stability and routine presents a simulacrum of real life (though one that is comparatively exaggerated and narrowed in scope) promoting transference of regularity into the digital space, in contrast to the intense disruption of the everyday by the pandemic, and augmenting that transference with a focus on player agency and self-determination of playstyle. Players’ shared affinities and engagement with the game as a form of serious leisure create personas that offer a divergent range of roles that are not mutually-exclusive – the social player, the turnip trader, the gardener, the artisan – allowing players to adopt multiple specializations within an expansive social environment. In essence, players of ACNH create an array of malleable, interchangeable gaming persona that successfully embody the routine and social play that are forcibly absent from real life during the pandemic. This paper draws upon responses from nearly 2000 ACNH players to frame how the game, a life simulator released during a pandemic curtailing real life, acts as a digital intersection of routine substitution, agency and social connectivity in a disconnected physical world. (Read More)
Aesthetics |
Internet privacy |
Social psychology |
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