Out of the everywhere, p.10
Animal Crossing, page 10
A roll of the dice moves the player a random number of spaces around the board. If they land on a space that can be purchased, and it hasn’t been purchased, they have the option to convert some of their money into a property (if they have enough). We’ll use a sideways-pointing triangle for conversion.
In Monopoly, you lose if you go bankrupt—with an empty money pool—and win if everyone else goes bankrupt. So why would you ever give up money (the key resource) to buy property?
In Monopoly, the buy “converter” changes resources from our money “pool” into resources in our property “pool.” [long description]
Adding the rent-paying “sink” and the rent-collecting “source” to our Monopoly diagram. [long description]
As Monopoly players know, you lose money from your pool when you have to pay rent, which we’ll represent with a downward-pointing triangle. (This is a resource “sink,” taking money away.) If you never gain money, you’re on an inevitable track toward bankruptcy.
You can gain small amounts of money by passing “GO” or from random card draws. But the main way you gain money is by collecting rent from other players, which we’ll represent with an upward-pointing triangle. (This is a resource “source.”)
As a player, your chances of gaining money and losing money are based on the randomness that drives your movements—the roll of the dice. I’ll add dice in the diagram to represent that. One reason we buy property in Monopoly is that each additional property we own increases the chance that another player will land on one of our properties and pay us rent. In other words, owning property is a way of skewing the randomness that drives the game.
This is a very simplified version of Monopoly, from the perspective of a single player, which I have adapted from Dormans’s book with Ernest Adams.3 While simple, it is enough to demonstrate a “dynamic engine” pattern, seen on the right-hand side.4 You spend money to get property, then owning property increases the amount of money you make. It’s a positive feedback loop—your resources going up (or down) makes them more likely to go up (or down).
Paying and collecting rent are driven by randomness. The more resources you have in your property pool, the more you skew rent collection’s randomness in your favor. [long description]
Dynamic engine patterns are all over games, of varying levels of complexity. I think I first saw one clearly in the game Lemonade Stand.5 In games like that, you make commodities to sell for money, then use the money to buy more ingredients (and better equipment), so you can make commodities in larger amounts (and more efficiently) and make more money.
These days my kids and I play a lot of Minecraft. In that kind of game, you mine raw materials so you can use them to build equipment that will allow you to mine more efficiently and/or mine new types of materials. This allows you to get the materials you need to build a processing facility, so you can produce materials more efficiently.
Once you start to recognize this kind of pattern, you’ll see it all over as you play. The same goes for the “static engine” pattern, which always works the same, rather than being changed by investment. Passing “GO” in Monopoly is a familiar example.6
In late 2020, as I began to play Animal Crossing: New Horizons on my own, I had just published a book called How Pac-Man Eats (based on work with Michael Mateas, Joseph C. Osborn, and others).7 A major focus of that book is what I call “operational logics.” Each operational logic combines a way that games work (on a system level) with a thing that games communicate (signaling to players how they might interpret the game), which suggests ways we might play.
For example, “collision” is a common logic for games with moving objects. On a system level, it might work a lot of different ways. Some games implement collision by detecting the overlap of each pixel, while others employ rough bounding boxes. Collision might communicate a lot of different things. Most straightforwardly, collision communicates things running into each other, which keeps player characters from passing through walls. At the same time, collision also can communicate one thing “consuming” another—which gives How Pac-Man Eats its name. Any combination of implementation and communication lets players know that causing one virtual object to run into another can have consequences, which will shape how they imagine play.
What we’ve just been discussing with Monopoly is the workings of “resource logics.” On a system level, they’re just collections of numbers (or other things) that go up and down. But on a communication level, they help players understand that things in the game can be gathered, held, traded, and lost.
I think of operational logics as X-ray glasses for games. They help you see what is going on inside the game at the same time as you can see (and play with) its surface. Primed as I was, I got out my resource logic glasses and used them to examine the beginning of New Horizons. And I found myself totally confused.
Gathering Resources
The beginning of ACNH is similar to many games, at least at a structural level. You start out by creating your character, in the airport sequence with Timmy and Tommy. Then you enter into the tutorial. The part after you disembark from the plane teaches you how to move your character. When you talk with Tom Nook, he suggests you do some placement crafting (with your tent, and later a camping cot) and encourages you to learn about character interaction (to help the others with their tents). Next he (finally) tasks you with gathering resources, as you would expect in the tutorial for a resource-focused game. If we were to diagram that first resource section, we’d mostly use our existing diagram style. But we’d also need to add a representation for events, like parties. I’ll use a square.
Playing the game again, this struck me as very odd. A game’s tutorial is supposed to teach you about the fundamentals of play. And in a resource-oriented game, that’s usually how to convert resources into other resources.
The lead-up to the initial party “event” in ACNH is relatively complex. [long description]
There is a tiny bit of such teaching, but it’s tucked away and optional. If you happen to talk with Tommy during the branch-gathering task, he’ll say:
I’d appreciate it if you’d hold onto any weeds you pull while you’re gathering branches.
In the near future, we’ll want to buy them from you.
Tommy suggests you can gather up weeds and exchange them for money. That’s how resource-oriented games work, and what their tutorials usually teach: how to gather up resources and exchange them for other resources. Or how to gather up resources and convert them into something for gathering further resources.
In ACNH’s opening, we could have sold the six fruit we gathered for 600 Bells. Or we could have crafted five of the branches we gathered into a fishing rod. We could have sold the fishing rod (100 Bells) or, more likely, we could have used it to go fishing.
Going further, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the tutorial focused on how to use this activity to “bootstrap” a resource loop. Even if you catch the least valuable fish possible, you’ll have 1,000 Bells’ worth of fish by the time your rod breaks. And a fishing rod only costs 400 Bells to buy. So you could start by crafting a rod, then go fishing, then sell your fish and buy a rod so you can fish again. It’s a minimum of 600 Bells profit each time you go around the loop, and you don’t have to wander around picking up any more sticks.
Selling branches (or fishing rods) only gets you a pittance. In a resource-focused game, you should use the resources you gather to level up your resource gathering, which is what would happen if you use the rod to fish. But ACNH’s tutorial doesn’t teach this. [long description]
But instead you go to a party, drink a lot of fruit juice, and wake up to find you’re indebted to a giant raccoon.
Building Out
Generally, after the tutorial, the next stage of a resource-oriented game is facing resource trade-offs. Do you use your initial resources to build StarCraft units for mining—or save some for combat defense, or go all-in on a combat rush?8 Do you buy Monopoly property as fast as you can—or save money for paying rent, so you don’t have to mortgage things early if you get unlucky with your movement rolls?
If New Horizons followed this pattern, the next step might be deciding whether to keep using your resources to buy fishing rods (maybe higher-quality ones)—or build an aquaculture tank for consistent fishing, or build a fruit farm, or hire other villagers to gather sticks for you.
Instead, the first post-tutorial stage of the game is picking up gig work via the NookPhone, which pays out in the “currency” of Nook Miles. You can get Miles for talking to other villagers, selling fruit, selling seashells, taking your first photo of the island, editing your profile, and other things the game will help you learn to do. But other tasks for producing Miles are closed to you—like fishing (you don’t have a rod) and catching bugs (you don’t have a net). These later options begin to unlock after you take Nook’s “DIY” workshop.
All of that, however, is just a way to dig out of the hole of your initial debt. As I retraced this path I’d already been down with my kids, I struggled to recall how we’d figured out the ways to use money to make money. When and how, for example, had we started using money to plant money trees, then harvesting that money to plant more? Had I just happened upon an article that mentioned it?
Replaying the early game, such things weren’t even hinted at. Rather, the next round of game suggestion, desire, and reward was the donation of five different types of wildlife to Tom Nook.
As discussed in part one, this led to the unlocking of things like flower planting and, at the end of the sequence, selecting a site for the museum.
Once the curator, Blathers, came to town, I happily donated more wildlife to the museum, and received the rewards: recipes for a vaulting pole and shovel, as well as an explanation of how I could find fossils (which would require crossing the river). At this point I decided to take stock of where I was.
I was mostly playing at night, sitting with Zoe as she settled in to sleep. I had just finished a round of fishing and bug catching. Even if other characters were going to bed, Blathers (being an owl) was nocturnal like me. I went to the museum and offered to donate. The only new item he could take off my hands was a carp.
My fishing rod had just broken, I still had an insect net, and I had the recipes for the rod and net. I could shake trees to get the branches I needed to craft additional ones, and I was already carrying three of the five branches I’d need to craft either.
My situation when I went to check in with Blathers. Numbers in the shaded areas of pools show how many of each item I had on hand, while numbers in the clear areas of pools show how many I still needed to complete something (i.e., crafting a rod or net, or opening the museum). [long description]
Previously I had given five different wildlife examples to Tom Nook, in order to bring Blathers to the island. At this point I’d given eight more exhibitable (novel) examples to Blathers, and it appeared I was running out of new ones I could easily catch at the time of day I played, on the parts of the island I could reach, during the current season. In other words, my available sources of new wildlife were running dry. And until Blathers had twenty different exhibits, the museum couldn’t open.
It seemed clear that I needed to take him up on his idea of fossil hunting. But that was going to be more complicated.
My next diagram shows what I needed to do to get fossils. Starting in the top left corner, since I had the axe recipe, I needed a stone and two more branches to craft an axe. That axe would give me access to a new source—cutting into (or even cutting down) trees for wood. Specifically, two types of wood, hardwood and softwood. With the recipes in hand, I could use five hardwood to make a shovel and use five softwood to make a vaulting pole. The shovel would let me dig up the fossils, while the pole would let me cross rivers to where the fossils could be found.
It was a lot of resource gathering and conversion, but I did it. Blathers closed up his camp so it could be turned into a construction site for the museum. I felt a sense of accomplishment.
If I wanted to get fossils for the museum, I would have to do all this. ACNH doesn’t shy from complex tasks. [long description]
Yet it wasn’t economic accomplishment. In fact, I’d taken a lot of economically valuable resources and put them into developing something with no economic benefit. The museum doesn’t charge admission. Having the museum open doesn’t make it easier for me to carry out other economic tasks. There’s no economic loop I’m completing through my actions. In fact, if you look at the diagram, you see a flow, not a loop.
With that insight, I realized I had been looking at Animal Crossing through the lens of the wrong operational logic.
Progressing
In a game like Monopoly, almost everything is a resource. You can gain and lose everything that is key: money, properties, neighborhoods you control, and the houses and hotels you use to gentrify those neighborhoods.
The same is true of The Sims games. You gain and lose jobs, hygiene, houses, hunger, friendships, fun, furnishings, appliances, and so on. The exception is aging. In The Sims 3 and 4, family members grow older, inexorably, and pass away.9
For that reason, from an operational logics perspective, character age in The Sims games is not a resource. Instead, it’s a “progression.” Resources go up and down, while progressions only move forward.
I’d been certain ACNH was a resource-based game. After all, the kids and I had spent so much playtime trying to amass the Bells needed to buy things in the store and pay off our home loans. But carefully looking at the beginning of the game didn’t bear out my certainty.
Nintendo didn’t make a mistake with the tutorial, by having it produce a party, rather than an economic engine. It teaches exactly what the game is about: using economic resources to push forward progressions.
Once I opened my eyes to the game’s progression focus, I saw it everywhere.
Collecting recipe cards is progress. Once you learn a piece of crafting knowledge, it is never forgotten. And because the game’s model has us all working to complete our individual collections, it suddenly made sense to me why we couldn’t share what we learned from them.
ACNH sometimes rewards you with resources for reaching progression milestones. [long description]
Filling out the Critterpedia is progress. Each novel creature you capture fills in a new part of its matrix with a colorful image, never to be returned to a gray icon. And again, the focus on making progress in our individual collections explains why we can’t gain Critterpedia knowledge from a creature caught by someone else, even if we live with it in our home.
Learning more expressions your character can make during conversations is progress. Once you can perform bewilderment or bashfulness, you don’t forget—but unlike other villagers, you also can’t pass on the knowledge.
Growing the museum’s collections is progress. Each new item occupies a space already allocated to it, most with a placard saying which player character donated it, and the museum won’t ever put an exhibit in storage (or sell it to support operating costs).
Expanding your house is progress. You can’t “sell back” home additions, or lose them in fires or other The Sims–like catastrophes.
Increasing what you can hold in your pockets is progress. You can learn more efficient “pocket organization” strategies that allow you to carry more inventory. Once you do, there is no way to return to your earlier, less organized ways.
Collecting the small, framed photos of each villager is progress. For many players, they represent “completing” the friendship with that particular villager.10 It’s like a Critterpedia for your friends.
Even buying clothes and furniture is progress, in part. While you can sell them back or drop them on the ground, any piece of clothing or item of furniture you have ever owned remains in your “catalog” collection—and can be used anytime in the game’s photo studio.
And most importantly, island development is progress. Nook will never revert Resident Services to a tent. Blathers will never close the museum’s art wing. The campsite will never return to nature. While weeds may grow and flowers may proliferate (and crossbreed), the trajectory of the island is one of increasing development.
Tellingly, not one of these progressions directly upgrades the player’s ability to produce resources. There are no improved sources, or more bountiful converters, among the game’s many, many progressions. While ACNH definitely demands workplay, its progressions are toward noneconomic ends.
In a game oriented toward progression, it’s important to know where you’re going. This doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the game. Different types of progression harness player desire toward different ends. So I began to turn my attention past the beginning of the game, seeking to understand the arcs of its progressions.
9
Compelled to Play
Max is nine as I write this (in 2023). Since I bought a Switch and we played Animal Crossing: New Horizons, our family has fallen in love with a series of Nintendo franchises that hadn’t had much meaning for us before. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was our next big game after New Horizons—and we completed the main game, the expansions, and all 120 shrines.
Later, Max threw himself into Pokémon, and he and I played many hours each of Pokémon Arceus, Shield, and Violet.1 The physical card game, on the other hand, didn’t hold our attention. But he loved the cartoons, and we all learned to root for Ash Ketchum. The thing Max wanted most for his birthday this year was a life-sized Fuecoco Pokémon stuffy. So a cute, pudgy red-and-white crocodile sits on the couch with me as I type these words.
