How Animal Crossing Helped Shape Me as a Gamer

Casual games weren't always a part of my repertoire as a gamer. I started out with games like Zelda and Pokemon, obsessing over the expansive worlds and grand quests. The heroic deeds of the characters and constant action kept me entertained from title sequence to end credits each time I turned on my Gameboy. Then something very special happened: I started seeing commercials for a game called Animal Crossing.

The game didn't look like anything else I'd ever played before and thanks to the lack of online content available to tell me anything and everything about the game I was flying completely blind, and yet nonetheless I knew I needed that tiny disc inside my GameCube. If you remember the commercials for Animal Crossing you probably remember exactly how bizarre the game looked, and yet I was incredibly drawn to it.

Booting up the game and being given a ramshackle house was such an odd feeling. Sure, I got that you were supposed to start from square one in games, but even as a kid I knew that this one-room unit was not for me. That’s why being immediately thrown into debt at the hands of Tom Nook was as alluring as it was frustrating. I cursed the debt, not only because it swallowed every bell I earned like the gaping maw of an aurumvorax, but because it drew me in with such little resistance as well.

I happily kept grinding away day by day, coming back and booting up my console to harvest all the fruit I could hold. The grind gripped me in the most enthralling way. Knowing I was making my house my own made every second of fishing and bug catching worth it, and it genuinely made me happy. There was never any rush to do these things either. I never felt any pressure to get things done beyond my own want for a bigger house to put all my gyroids in. There wasn't a world that was ending or a princess in peril and not even some evil villain with a grand plot. I wasn't running around the tall grass trying to level up my super-powered monsters, I was running around catching butterflies and picking weeds. This right here was one of the biggest benefits Animal Crossing provided me.

In all this grinding and menial tasks, I found a sort of zen. The comfort of slowly chipping away at the thousands of bells I owed this conniving raccoon was something I had never felt in a game at that point, at least not to that degree. Sure beating a difficult boss was satisfying, but the genuine love I found among all these chores was something special to me.

The elation I felt after I had paid off my first full debt to Tom Nook was perfectly encapsulated by my character’s victory dance. My house was finally mine and I was free to pick apples and catch fish in perfect peace- Until I went back to Nook’s rinky-dink shop in the corner of town. He too was excited that I had paid off my debt to him, as I'm sure any debtor is, but then he announced my new home upgrade. For a fleeting moment a smile crossed my face, but I quickly realized what this meant. The smile lasted much longer in his eyes as he announced the numbers of my upcoming renovation. Thousands of more bells to be owed to the raccoon, thousands! I learned this of course with next to no money left in my pocket, having emptied out my coffers just a minute ago.

I was devastated… Until I made a wonderful realization that I got to do this all over again. Shaking the trees for their bounty, smacking the rocks hoping gold would come popping out, creeping along the shore watching for darting shadows, all for more upgrades to my house! From then on my love for Animal Crossing only grew, as I became even deeper enveloped in the antics of the charming game.

This is all reflected in me as a gamer as well. I feel like I have much more patience with games now, as well as a love for the simplicity of things. If it weren't for Tom Nook and the rest of the Animal Crossing experience I truly don't believe I would possess either of those things, at least not to the degree which I do now. That simple GameCube game did much more for me as a lover of games than I realized at the time. It's only upon self-reflection over a decade later that I'm realizing it, but just like paying off your debt to a raccoon, it's better late than never.