Out of the everywhere, p.5
Animal Crossing, page 5
Yet in ACNH, when a recipe card washes up on the beach (as they do daily, each folded into a letter in a bottle), player characters are rivals for the information, which is probably unavailable for purchase at the store. In our house, this developed into a moment of tension for those watching, when one of our characters would come upon such a bottle. After we’d read the note, we’d see the name of the recipe on the card in the playing character’s inventory, but they hadn’t learned it yet. Maybe it’d be something that one of the kids had been wanting to learn to make. Or maybe it just sounded enticing—like a Leaf Mask or a Terrarium.
Zoe would read the recipe card name to herself, and one of us would read it to Max. If he wasn’t playing, we’d likely hear “Please can I have it?”—escalating to “Please-please-please please!” Or Zoe, if she wasn’t playing, would say something like “Oh, that’s one I really want. Can you leave it for me? Can I trade you for something?” As a parent, if I just left it, I knew it would go to the next kid to play, which didn’t seem entirely fair. If I was flush with resources, I might just read the recipe and then make the object for both kids. But that could still sadden kids who knew that the knowledge might now never be theirs. And often the recipes required things I didn’t yet have, and maybe didn’t know how to get.
At first, the best we could manage (with light parental pressure) was a family policy of leaving duplicate recipe cards lying on the beach for others, rather than hoarding them for later sale. Eventually, though, after one too many fights about recipes, we came to a more elaborate policy: once you know a recipe, if someone else leaves all the ingredients required outside your house, you will make the item for them when it’s your turn to play. This created some resentment about using one person’s playtime to make things for another, but it was a lot less than the resentment that had come from people hoarding knowledge (and, conversely, being resentful that others weren’t thankful enough when it was given to them). All of this arose, of course, from ACNH’s odd choice of making knowledge into something momentarily physical—like a book that burns once it is read—and unshareable.
Undiscoverable Knowledge
In another strange twist to how knowledge works in ACNH, at the start of the game you actually can’t read recipe cards—you don’t know how. You must find out how to learn recipes at Nook’s workshop. And of course you can only bring a recipe into existence at a workbench, including the recipe for the workbench itself, so you’ll have to use Nook’s workbench at least a couple of times. I glossed over the workshop before, but now is a good time to return to it.
Speaking personally, I found Nook’s workshop to be another early game disappointment. We’d learned that tent placement had nothing to it, while character creation was so limited I at first didn’t even think of it as crafting, so my hope was that we would get the real substance of the crafting at the workshop. Also, my perception was probably colored by playing the original (Java) Minecraft. I suspected the ACNH DIY workbench might be like Minecraft’s “crafting table.”6
I could make things in Minecraft without a crafting table (such as the crafting table itself) by placing materials in a 2 × 2 grid available in the inventory screen. But the possibilities were pretty limited. Most recipes of interest required the 3 × 3 grid offered by the table.
I could learn recipes a number of ways in Minecraft, and one was just to experiment with shapes on the table. If I made a square of wooden planks on the table (leaving the middle square open), I’d get a chest. If I made a bowl shape of planks instead (leaving the top row and middle square open), I’d get a boat. If I made an “H” shape of sticks, I’d get three pieces of ladder. If I alternated planks and sticks across the bottom two rows, I’d get three pieces of fence. It was a pleasure just to experiment, and there was much to discover.
Recipe book (left) and crafting table interface (right) open in Java Minecraft version 1.19.2. [long description]
When I found a recipe this way, it’d be added to my recipe book, for later use. This also meant I could learn recipes outside the game, including from other players. Employ a recipe from a friend (or a wiki) once and it’d be in my recipe book forever. It’s interesting to learn recipes, seeing the internal logic of the crafting system—what each recipe combines and in what arrangement.
As Tom Nook introduced his DIY workshop, it seemed quite possible that New Horizons’ item crafting would be much like early Minecraft’s. As Nook explains it, “The basic idea is to gather materials, follow a recipe, and then craft using a workbench like this one!” These are certainly the same three elements needed in Minecraft. But the Animal Crossing workbench is significantly different from the Minecraft table.
That said, let’s start with the similarities. First, “fidelity of action” (returning to the language of the review of in-game crafting systems that Grow, Dickinson, and Pagnutti led). Neither game has any, unless you count spatially arranging the ingredients in Minecraft. You just put the ingredients in and the end result comes out. In New Horizons, this is delayed by an animation of your character hard at work (making something indistinct).
Tom Nook looks on skeptically while my nascent crafting project is hidden in a cloud. [long description]
The second similarity is a lack of “player expression.” There is no way to put your personal stamp on anything made with these crafting systems. (And this is quite a departure from Minecraft’s more famous block-based crafting system.) I was excited, later in ACNH, to be introduced to “customization kits” for the items produced through recipe-based crafting. Only to be disappointed all over again when I found out that all they can do is change the color of certain regions on certain items, among a predetermined set of colors.
There are also three clear differences between the ACNH workbench and the Minecraft table. One is how “strongly defined” the recipes are. The recipes in ACNH are “fixed.” That means, unlike in recipes in our everyday world (whether for baking or making), you can’t substitute materials. If you have the eight peaches needed to make the Peach Dress recipe, but you have only learned the recipe for the Orange Dress (which requires eight oranges), you can’t make either one. This is somewhat dismaying, because in our everyday world, and even in other Nintendo games like Breath of the Wild, trying out a known recipe with substituted ingredients is part of the fun of cooking—and of other forms of making.
Many Minecraft recipes offer some of this potential for exploration and discovery by being “parametric.” For example, the pickaxe recipe is arranged in a T-shape. The stem of the T must be made up of two wooden sticks. But the top of the T can accommodate a number of tool materials. If you use wooden planks, which are easy to come by when you start playing, you can make a wood pickaxe for your initial work—but it will soon fall apart. Later in the game you might try blocks of stone, or iron, or even diamond as your tool material. The result will last significantly longer, and look cooler. In other words, if Animal Crossing used a system like Minecraft’s, you’d have just one Fruit Dress recipe and could experiment with the results of using whatever fruit you wanted.
The major differences between the crafting table in Minecraft and the DIY workbench in ACNH all boil down to a design choice: the choice to make Animal Crossing recipe knowledge undiscoverable. The spatial element of the Minecraft table allows for experimentation and discovery of recipes. The parametric nature of Minecraft recipes allows for exploring substitutions in known recipes. The table’s space can also differentiate between recipes with the same ingredients, through different arrangements, so that some discovery-limiting additional element (like “recipe cards”) is not required. In contrast, Animal Crossing recipes are fixed commodities, available only through the game’s other systems. This has significant consequences, which would come back to bite us.
Knowledge as Progress
Knowledge is also what drove us back to playing Super Dino, after the week as our own characters. New Horizons clearly expected us to know things we didn’t know—either as players or as characters—and that knowledge seemed to be available only to the Resident Representative.
After we woke Super Dino from their slumber, we soon got a call from Tom Nook. Using his control of our company phone, he added an app for being able to play with other residents. At first we were all excited—this was finally the opportunity to do activities with the game’s nonplayer characters like we’d seen in the opening video! But we found out the app was instead offering a strange kind of multiplayer, which I’ll discuss more later. This allowed our characters to do things like fish and catch bugs together, but only the player who initiated the activity could keep what they caught. For everyone else, our acquisitions ended up in the recycling bin in Tom Nook’s tent.
Speaking of apps, it was also a surprise to realize that Super Dino didn’t yet have the app that had been tracking the fish, insects, and sea life caught by the rest of us: the Critterpedia. We tried catching a fish to see if that would make a difference, but it didn’t. Yet another reason to go see Nook in person and figure out what was going on.
We ducked through the flap of the Resident Services tent and found him standing there, just as he did for all our other characters. But when we asked him what he thought we should be doing, he didn’t mention our loan, which was his focus with the others. Instead, he asked us to bring him examples of island life: “I’d be most curious to see any creatures that you do catch, hm? By all means, bring them to me!”
Up to this point, we’d done two things with the fish, seafloor life, and insects we’d caught. We’d kept some to display around (or even in) our tents, including duplicates of particularly cool ones. The others we’d sold to Timmy for Bells, which let us buy occasional things at the store.
Still, catching fish wasn’t difficult—and we got a lot of duplicates of the common ones. So Super Dino was willing to part with one for Nook. “Oh, what a catch!” he said. Then, after a moment reflecting on the potential diversity of life on our island, Nook made a proposal: “An old friend of mine runs a museum, and I’d love to send it to him for a closer look.”
We could have refused, gotten our fish back, and presumably stopped all progress in the game yet again. But I knew to expect a museum in the game, so we agreed. Then Nook said: “Oh! That reminds me . . . This is in no way tied to your generous donation just now, but I have a useful app to show you.” (He paused to transmit the app to Super Dino’s phone. And yes, he is that transparent a liar.) “I sent you the Critterpedia app. It’s a terrific resource for an aspiring island researcher such as yourself.”
What followed was a tight little reward loop. We could go catch a common fish or bug—or pick one up from the tanks our other characters had left around the island—and take it to Nook for an immediate boost in our abilities.
For the second creature, we got the recipe for a flimsy axe, allowing us to collect a key ingredient for all the recipes we’d seen that needed wood (such as building our own DIY workbench), as well as a set of further recipes for making things with wood. For the third, he gave a “proper reward”—a bag of flower seeds. He suggested we plant them, but didn’t give any information on how planting works. We discovered it’s a version of placement, but the seeds grow into plants over time. After the fourth creature, he told us that watering cans would let us propagate and crossbreed flowers to develop rare colors, then sent us the DIY instructions for a watering can. Like the flowers, the possibilities of ACNH were opening before our eyes.
Then things changed gears with the fifth creature we presented. As we made the donation, Nook interrupted our conversation:
Hold the phone—someone’s calling!
Blathers, is that you?
Oho, what splendid timing!
Yes, yes . . . Do you remember the venture we discussed? Well, it’s come to fruition!
Those aren’t literal flowers around Nook’s head. They signal how excited he is to tell Blathers about the island. [long description]
Nook invited Blathers the owl to our island, so he could “help identify and preserve local creatures.” Our reward for the fifth donation was a kit we could place where we wanted Blathers’s camp built. Before we left, Nook made clear what to actually expect in our chosen location: “We’ll need a good-sized space to really build out a world-class museum . . . so do keep that in mind.”
As we brought things to Nook—some we had just caught, others collected from the tanks we’d placed on the ground—something strange revealed itself about the Critterpedia. At first it looks, as its name suggests, like an encyclopedia of creature knowledge. It has long grid displays for insects, fish, and seafloor creatures. Each square in the grid shows a colorful image for a creature you know about, or a small gray icon for a creature you don’t know. You can select one you know about for a larger image, information about its seasonality, and the time range(s) it is active each day.
But if you pick up a novel creature from a tank, your Critterpedia doesn’t show you as having any knowledge of it, no matter how long you carry it around or live with it in your tent. Later, when the museum is built, you can go see a creature and read a plaque about it—but your Critterpedia will still show a gray icon for it. You can even pick up a tank creature and bring it to Blathers to donate to the museum, and opt in to Blathers giving you a talk with his personal thoughts about the creature . . . and your Critterpedia will still say you know nothing about it.
A largely empty Critterpedia insect grid. [long description]
This is because the Critterpedia is using what looks like knowledge as, instead, a measure of progress. Like the Pokédex in the Pokémon franchise, the Critterpedia is not a repository of what your character knows, but rather a scorecard for creatures your character has successfully hunted. It’s enticement to come back to the game with a fishing rod, wetsuit, and net at strange times of day, in different sorts of weather, in every possible location on your island, and at all times of year. As writer and editor Louryn Strampe puts it in Wired: “Some of the fish I’ve caught only spawn for a few hours in locations like the uppermost cliff river, the mouth of a river, or in a pond. The same goes for bugs. Certain types will only spawn on rotten vegetables, trash, or villagers.”7
As I’ll discuss more in part two of this book, because Animal Crossing has no obvious scores or levels (and its “ending” is just a segue to another set of content), completing the Critterpedia is one of the common ways players think of themselves as having “won” or “beaten” the game. Another idea of winning (or component of winning) that players identify is even more ambitious, though it can be undertaken collaboratively: completing the museum. For our family, the museum was a much stronger pull than our Critterpedias, and our first step was to unlock it.
Progress Versus Play
Blathers’s camp—where the museum would one day sit—was established the day after Super Dino selected the site. We were happy to find that Blathers was more available to our characters than Nook. While the five donations to Nook all had to be made by the Resident Representative, anyone could talk to Blathers and help with progress toward his goal.
As Blathers explains, he too wants to open a museum on the island. Not just for living creatures, but also for fossils—and fossils are found in the ground, mostly in so-far-inaccessible parts of the island. To address this, he gives players two recipes. First, the recipe for a vaulting pole, so rivers can finally be crossed. (Freedom!) Second, the recipe for a flimsy shovel, so that things can be dug from the ground.
The pole and shovel recipes can both be crafted using particular sorts of wood, which can be cleaved from trees using the flimsy axe (which itself can be crafted from tree branches and small rocks found on the ground). Around now players may also realize, perhaps with a hint from Tommy, that larger rocks can be hit with an axe or shovel to break loose materials such as iron, clay, and small rocks.
Blathers also tells characters specifically what he needs to open the museum. “If I am to open the museum, I must acquire more items to exhibit . . . 15 more, to be precise.” This is a further fifteen beyond the five already donated to Nook. Only four fossils appear on the island per day and, as we discovered, some of them were in higher-elevation areas, which the vaulting pole would not help us reach. To make progress (and after those quick rewards, we were really into progress), we would need to depend on donating more fish, insects, and sea life.
The problem was that each of Blathers’s twenty exhibits had to be unique. And only a limited number of fish, insects, and seafloor creatures spawned on the parts of the island we could reach, at the time of day we played (almost always midafternoon), in the month when we were playing. So if we wanted to keep progressing, we were going to have to make some hard choices.
Blathers can be pretty serious about his goals. [long description]
Specifically, we were going to have to decide how important Max’s aquarium was. He’d spent a lot of time curating and building it. And Zoe and I had donated many creatures for it. Frankly, he just loved it. It brought him joy to start the game in his tent and wind his way through the collection of animated, brightly colored creatures in their tanks.
But to Animal Crossing, Max’s aquarium didn’t exist. The game has almost no way of “seeing” the things players create with placement crafting (though later I’ll discuss an exception: the apparently panoptic Happy Home Academy). And Max’s aquarium held almost all of our unusual creatures.
Max was torn. He wanted what he had created to be as important as, or more important than, what the game’s mechanisms asked of us. But at the same time he really wanted to see the museum and what rewards the game would give us.
