Hello again! For this week’s first post I will be taking a look at a fellow blogger and colleague Mahalah or MoshiBoi (here’s a link to their Blog) and their response to an article titled “Revisiting Animal Crossing: New Leaf was a Mistake” by Kotaku writer ‘Narelle Ho Sang‘ , the original article can be found here.
I myself have never played an Animal Crossing game (a sin I know) but I have played a similar title in Stardew Valley and I am certainly looking forward to Animal Crossing: New Horizons‘ release in the coming weeks. I mention this as I need to state that I am not familiar with the game itself an it’s intricacies.
Animal Crossing: New Leaf Cover Art 
Animal Crossing: New Horizons Cover Art
During my read of the MoshiBoi’s blog post, the title of the original article was quoted being about why Animal Crossing: New Leaf was a mistake. So my opinion on reading the blog was shaped by this misunderstanding and so I myself felt the article was a waste of time. I felt like the article more heavily talked about the problems with why returning to the game was a hard time due to NPC interactions heavily berating the player for leaving their beloved town.
After reading the original article for myself however, I now see that it is a talk about the problems with revisiting the game itself after putting it down for a long period of time. As Narelle stated “The hours and calendar days pass in real-time. The seasons change…”, the whole time they weren’t playing the Town continued to grow and NPCs grew tired of missing the player, who is the Mayor in this game.
Going back to Moshiboi’s post, they go on to mention that the writer was immersed and clearly had fun while playing the game originally. While some of their planning and decorative decisions might be hard to look at, they at the time still enjoyed the game and did what they wanted to.
Both Blog and Article mention NPCs putting the player down for not playing the game for a while, Narelle stating “Each (NPC) laying on the guilt with emotional surgical preciseness—cutting me deep.” This goes to show the player’s attachment to these characters and the town they had made. This is the reason the NPCs talk in this way, to make the player feel bad and to get them to come back for a bit longer. Moshiboi, however, paints this as a severe and inappropriate “Guilt Trip” stating “I think getting guilt tripped by an NPC for not playing the game in a while is a bit much”. This is a fair statement as honestly these NPCs don’t know about the player’s attachment to the game or do they know about real-life events that might prevent play.
Moshiboi goes to say that since the game is mostly targeted at Children that a child hearing these statements from NPCs would make them want to come back even more so. This is because of the blurred line between Reality and Fiction that children are unable to discern.
My take away from both the Article and Blog is that you can look back at your past self’s decisions and either love it or hate it, but you can’t neglect the fact that people change. As both authors stated, they have spent hours upon hours making their town into their own vision. Placing things where they want and doing what they want at any given time, this lends itself to the notion that while immersed in such a free game they enter the ‘Magic Circle’. This term refers to the zone a player can fall into when deeply immersed in a game’s world. It seems both of these players did at one point or another. Simply put, originally, the players loved what they were doing.
Another thing is that people’s style and tastes change over time. What was appealing to you 5 years ago might not necessarily appeal to you now. As someone who played soccer for 16 years of his life I can tell you that now having not played for 2 years now I have little to no interest in the sport. People Change.
People change but they had fun originally!
That’s it for this post, again you can find the original article and Moshiboi’s response here:
“Revisiting Animal Crossing: New Leaf was a mistake” by Natelle Ho Sang – Kotaku
“Week 3: Response to why New Leaf was a mistake” by Mahalah/Moshiboi
I myself will be back later this week to talk about Subjectivity in gaming, I hope to push out an interesting read.
Thanks for reading!
– Nathan “Naff” Hibbert
Naff's Gaming Blog 