Zen and the Art of Animal Crossing

How a simple game about island life is helping me manage my anxiety in a time of crisis.

Video games have defined much of my life. I’ve been a gamer ever since I got a Sega Genesis in grade school. Throughout my childhood, teen years, and young adulthood, video games have been a mainstay in how I pass my leisure time.

They’ve also helped me get through the worst parts of my life. Since getting diagnosed with mental illness when I was 12, video games have been a constant for me. They helped me focus my anxiety and depression into a tangible thing to prevent me from falling too far, and they served as an outlet for my manic energy.

Rather than play a lot of games, I tended to play a few games to death. I would play and replay games like Final Fantasy VII and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, dumping countless hours into clearing them, resetting, and clearing them again. I played World of Warcraft religiously for a few years, accumulating loads of rare gear along the way. I’ve driven and walked all over my city for various AR games — first Ingress, then Pokemon Go, then (currently) Harry Potter: Wizards Unite.

One of the games I missed along the way (and I missed a lot of games that would become classics) was Animal Crossing. I played a friend’s copy a little bit when it came out, didn’t really care for it, and never played again in favor of more action-oriented games.

A while ago, a friend recommended that I pick up Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, a mobile variant of the series (which now has several games across different consoles). After a false start, I got hooked. It tickled my completionist nerves while also having a laid-back feeling about it.

If I was anxious, I could dump loads of time and energy into doing things in the game. If I didn’t feel like playing, it would be there for me when I got back eventually. It felt very low-pressure while still being robust.

I had initially figured I’d pass on the latest version of the game, Animal Crossing: New Horizons. I’ve been losing interest in Pocket Camp for a while, as it has been getting repetitive with the same three events. I figured the console version would be the same.

Then COVID-19 struck.

Suddenly, the gamer community was freaking out about Animal Crossing. It had a release date of mid-March, which suddenly fell squarely in the timeframe where everything was shutting down. People begged Nintendo to release it early to give the community something to be happy about in all the death and despair.

It eventually came out to much fanfare, and my feeds began to get posts about how fantastic it was to just relax with the lazy, zen gameplay that Animal Crossing provides. Several of my friends got it, and people were happy to have something good in their lives.

So, amid a crumbling society where I wasn’t allowed to leave the house and people were fighting over toilet paper, I bought it.

For those of you unfamiliar with Animal Crossing, the basic premise of the game is that it can be played as much or as little as you’d like. Everyone approaches it on their own terms. If you want to be a completionist and get every item in the game, you can do that. If you just like catching fish all day, you can do that too.

The premise is that you are the sole human resident of a town full of animals. You can interact with them and do them favors to get things like furniture and clothes, and they’re all fairly colorful and interesting characters.

You can customize your appearance with a wide variety of clothing options. You also get a house that you can customize with said furniture, wallpaper, and flooring, and whatever else you can find in your town. With that house, however, comes a home loan, which you must pay back to the resident shopkeeper, Tom Nook. Once you pay it back, however, you can expand your house and make it bigger, with new floors and rooms to decorate, along with a bigger loan.

The basic gameplay is that you are collecting stuff to sell so you can pay back your loan. Along the way, you can catch fish and bugs, collect fruit, dig up fossils, and collect a whole bunch of stuff to furnish your house and dress your avatar.

The game takes place in real-time, meaning that the time, date, and seasons change as you go. Fish that are available in the summer aren’t around in the winter, and things that show up during the day aren’t there at night. Seasons change, and so do the leaves on the trees. If you play at noon every day, you’re missing out on a whole host of bugs and fish that show up after dark.

This is a very bare-bones description of what you can do in the game, but that’s the glory of it. There are whole aspects of the game that you can explore, dumping countless hours into it, but you don’t have to if you don’t want to. You can collect all the fossils and bugs and fish if you’d like, but it’s not mandatory. There’s no quest or requirement to do it, but you can if you want.

The latest variant that I bought, New Horizons, starts you on a deserted island that you have to populate. The same basic mechanics are there, but there are (I understand) a lot of new aspects to it that set it apart from other games in the series.

One of the immediate benefits is that, to establish your island, you need to play for a few weeks of real-time. You can’t start playing on your first day, dump 18 hours into it, and have a fully-formed island. Things take time. At one point, you build a bridge, and it takes a day of real-time to get constructed. Some things take a day or two before they’re set up, which means that you can’t interact with that thing until tomorrow.

The pacing of the game is such that, for the first few weeks, you need to show up regularly to keep things moving. It teaches you the basics of what to do, but for a while, there are sections of the island that are cut off for you because you don’t have the tools to get there yet.

There is also a crafting element that requires you to build tools to collect resources, bugs, and fish. Those tools constantly break, so you will be regularly building tools, collecting resources, breaking your tools, and building new ones. Eventually, you can learn to make stronger tools that take longer to break, and tools that allow you to cross rivers and climb cliffs.

There are all sorts of bugs and fish to collect as well, but it will take you around a year to get them all. Every month, some bugs and fish cycle out, and others cycle in, meaning that there are some creatures you won’t be able to get until winter.

As with the other games, there’s furniture and clothes to collect, but now you can craft them as well, so there are more reasons to collect resources than just tools. Recipes show up in a variety of places and scenarios, but they’re random, so your friend may have a recipe that you don’t.

Then there are the seasonal events that coincide with real-world holidays. They’re currently having a “Bunny Day” event that makes you collect eggs. There is talk of an Earth day event, so it’s not just limited to the big ones.

All told, there is tons to do all over your little island paradise. From attracting people to your island to collecting different fruits that grow on other islands to building a museum dedicated to the fish, bugs, and fossils you find, you’ll never really be bored.

For me, this game has been a godsend. As a typically neurotic, anxious person, not being able to see friends or go out into the world makes me anxious. The thought that I or someone close to me might die is depressing.

So, a little colorful world filled with colorful characters where I can run around and fish or catch bugs to my heart’s content is a dream come true. There’s something relaxing about walking around my island and shaking all the trees to see what comes out. (Watch out for wasps!)

As you unlock more and more features over time, your list of activities grows. Do you want to fly to other deserted islands to search for resources and potential residents? Go for it. Do you want to terraform your island to make it into your own personal ideal? Why not? Feel like eating a bunch of fruit and digging up fully-grown trees? That’s something you can do.

I’ve only been playing for a little more than a week, but I’m enjoying the heck out of it. I can spend hours catching bugs and fish to help pay down my home loan (you still have one of those in this game). There are procedurally-generated quests that never end, so there have been times where I just keep completing these small tasks until I get a five that are a pain to do. I’ve played for five hours in a day, I’ve played for 45 minutes on my lunch break.

And, along the way, my anxiety has gone down. When the world seems to be burning and the people in charge are roasting marshmallows instead of fighting the fire, I can lose myself in my miniature world of catching bugs and picking fruit. Since it’s my island, I make the rules, and my rules say that relaxing is the order of the day, every day.

It’s always fun catching new fish or bugs, keeping an eye out for things that sell for lots of money so I can pay down my loan faster, chatting with the residents of my home island, or flying to new islands to see what’s there. Sometimes, if my friends are also playing, I can visit their island if I want.

I can also do none of that, opting to arrange my house or craft new furniture instead. There is no set goal in the game. You can pay down your house if you want, but it’s not a requirement. You can religiously collect fossils, bugs, and fish for the museum, or you can just sell them all to the shop.

Right now, I’m focused on making money so I can expand my house again. With the help of my friends, I’ve collected all the fruit and planted it across my island for future harvest, so that bit of completionist in me is satisfied. Other than that, I’m just making my way through my first few weeks to see what new surprises the game has for me.

The whole thing has helped me a lot. As I mentioned, I’m a neurotic, anxious person by nature. In this game, there are no time limits, no solid objectives, no expectations, and no wrong way to play. I can be kind of a control freak about a lot of things, but with this, I have absolute control over my island and environment.

So, all of my frustrations with the real world get channeled into this game. I can’t go out and do the things I want to do, so I run around my island, free to go wherever I want. I can’t interact with people in the real world, so I interact with my villagers, or sometimes my actual friends in the game world.

There are so many things in the real world that I can’t control, but having some level of control over this virtual world helps me balance the feeling of helplessness that is so prevalent right now. In a world full of chaos and despair, it’s my little zen garden, tranquil and calm.

So, I plan to play regularly until the lockdown is lifted, and probably for a long time after that. COVID-19 isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, so I suspect I will have my little zen game to keep me company for a while yet.