Animal Crossing is a game series with an ever-changing definition depending on who you ask. In Animal Crossing, players can pay off debt to build and expand their home, develop their surroundings, interact with a cast of adorable animal villagers, fish, catch bugs, design fashion, participate in annual events, grow flowers, and much more. The series is massively popular, with the newly-released Animal Crossing: New Horizons selling quicker than any Nintendo Switch game in regions such as Japan and the UK.

New Horizons could not have come at a better time. Many of us are either experiencing lockdown or voluntarily minimising our time spent outside due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. It is difficult to find a gaming outlet that has not yet published an opinion piece on how Animal Crossing is currently improving their mental health. But how? And why?

In this article, I will explain the science and psychology behind how and why Animal Crossing is beneficial to our mental health. Before we begin, there are a few quick disclaimers:

Some examples here may also be applicable to games such as Stardew Valley and Harvest Moon, but I unfortunately don’t know enough about these games to say for certain. As my focus is on mental health, I won’t be discussing topics such as the gameplay loop of Animal Crossing. If you are interested in this, I recommend reading The Rhetoric of Video Games by Ian Bogost (2008). I do not work for Nintendo and I’m not paid or encouraged in any way to promote Animal Crossing, I’m just a researcher who cares about your mental wellbeing.

As usual, there will be a summary at the end if you do not wish to read everything. Now, let’s begin!

Contents

A Calm Life

While we are currently living through the Covid-19 pandemic, something very familiar to us was described as an “epidemic” in 2017 – anxiety (Rosen, 2017). Anxiety disorders are the most commonly diagnosed mental health disorder in the world, with research from the previous decade placing the number of diagnoses at around 117 million (Kessler et al., 2005; Baxter et al., 2014).

Frequently experiencing anxiety is dangerous due to its effects on the body. When we are anxious, our body produces the stress hormone cortisol (Elenkov et al., 2000). In basic terms, cortisol keeps our body on high alert and triggers the production of glucose to provide us with energy (Thau & Sharma, 2019). This boost of energy can explain why anxiety is accompanied by physical behaviours such as leg shaking and nail biting (Sachan & Chaturvedi, 2012). If we are frequently anxious and therefore triggering the production of cortisol, we are placing ourselves at risk of a multitude of health problems such as an increased heart rate, high blood pressure, and damage to the blood vessels, heart, kidneys, and liver (Guerts & Sonnentag, 2006; Lemke et al., 2008; Heitler, 2018).

Let’s take an all too real example of someone who can’t tear themselves away from reading Covid-19 news. With every worrying headline they read, they can feel their chest tighten and they begin biting their nails, ignoring medical advice to minimise face touching. To protect this person’s mental and physical health, we need a two-fold plan: i) we need to reduce their anxiety and stop the production of cortisol, and ii) we need to make sure their heightened energy is not expended on harmful stress responses such as skin picking, hair pulling or nail biting (Tasaka et al., 2014; Kubo et al., 2015).

In a previous article, I described how video games can be used to reduce anxiety before an operation. The participant is so immersed in the video game that they pay little attention to the stressful medical world around them. This same logic can be applied to why Animal Crossing helps us calm down during stressful times. When we start the game, we have a rotation of tasks to attend to. We dig up fossils, pick weeds, hit rocks, gather fruit, check what furniture and clothes are available, check on our villagers, catch fish, catch bugs, the list continues until time itself vanishes before our eyes.

Cognitive Load Theory argues that we have a limited capacity to think about and focus on different tasks (De Jong, 2010). When we are focused on completing the rotation of daily tasks in Animal Crossing, we are so distracted by the game that we do not have the cognitive resources available to dwell on our anxiety. As our hands are occupied by the game, they are not free to pick, pull or put into our mouth.

The range and amount of tasks available in Animal Crossing is perfect for distracting you from your source of anxiety, and ensures that your hands are occupied when experiencing a surge of energy.

A Rewarding Life

In the world we live in, there are two unfortunate realities:

While hard work is often necessary for success, it does not guarantee success. We can work incredibly hard at something and yet still be unsuccessful. Life is often not as rewarding as it could be. For example, we study for years to receive a diploma as a reward, and employees may wait month to month to receive a financial reward for their hard work.

To combat the lack of rewards in our daily life, psychologists recommend setting goals for ourselves that give us a sense of achievement and fulfilment (Deci & Ryan, 2000). When we look at our to-do list and see everything ticked off for the day, we feel good about ourselves due to receiving a rush of dopamine (Niv, 2009). Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that improves our mood, helps us to relax, and can even act as a natural pain relief (Harvard Medical School, 2010).

Animal Crossing not only allows us to set ourselves goals for the day (e.g. raising enough money to pay for a bridge for the island), but Animal Crossing as a game series typically comes with built-in goals. Common goals in the Animal Crossing series include paying off your house debt with Tom Nook, completing fashion challenges (e.g. dressing head-to-toe in ‘comfy’ clothing), and completing the game’s museum of fish, bugs and fossils.

The beauty of these goals is that they are commonly achieved with good old-fashioned hard work. People are paying off their home loan in New Horizons by repeatedly catching and selling pockets filled with tarantulas (yes, seriously). It took me around 140 attempts to catch the rare Stringfish. When I finally did, I leaped into the air and very embarrassingly said “WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? I AM”. It was frustrating, but I was finally able to catch it by being persistent, and boy did it feel good.

In a world that often seems unfair, Animal Crossing is a game where you are frequently rewarded for hard work and perseverance. While you won’t get a diploma or paycheque from it, it’s a nice getaway into a digital world where hard work and persistence often pays off, and our brain rewards us for it in the form of happy, positive feelings.

An Adorable Life

In New Horizons, players can invite new villagers to join their island by meeting them at randomly-generated islands. With nearly 400 villagers in the game, I held my breath the first time I visited an island to see who I would potentially be welcoming to my island.

I was greeted by an angel. A vision of radiance. A beacon of light.

It was a puppy!

Bea is the backbone of my island. She often has other villagers over at her house, she is always watering the flowers I plant, and she keeps other villagers fit by exercising with them. Bea loves my island, and I love Bea.

At its core, Animal Crossing is an adorable game series. My social media feed is filled with pictures and videos of players’ favourite villagers singing, exercising, sitting by a tree, napping etc., all taken from the perspective of a proud and doting parent. And this is exactly how the game wants you to feel.

We find great joy in looking at adorable things that make us go ‘aww’ (Schleidt et al., 1980; Brosch et al., 2007), and this feeling triggers our desire to take care of and nurture the adorable little thing (Glocker et al., 2009). In a game based on nurturing your environment and taking care of others, I can imagine the cutesy designs of many villagers (e.g. big eyes and round faces) is no accident.

So Animal Crossing is a series designed to elicit the nurturing ‘aww’ reaction. Let’s say that someone plays New Horizons every day for a year surrounded by cuteness, can that have any sort of influence on them? There is an emerging body of research to suggest that it can.

Research by Sherman et al. (2009) showed participants pictures of adult or baby animals, then rated their performance in a game of Operation. The group that were shown baby animals performed better at Operation, and it is argued that this is due to the adorable baby animals eliciting a feeling of tenderness and nurturing. Looking at cute animals before a task can even increase our focus and concentration compared to neutral items such as food (Nittono et al., 2012).

In the interest of transparency, I’d like to point out that these studies are not without their limitations. Sherman et al.’s research did not include a non-cute group for the sake of comparison (known as a ‘control group’), and the artificial nature of the study (i.e. using a game of Operation) limits how applicable these findings are to everyday life. Nittono et al.’s research also suffers from a common problem in psychological research of using small samples of university students that may not apply to different populations. Nevertheless, these studies provide interesting insight into how a daily dose of cuteness and nurturing our villagers in Animal Crossing can potentially help us to focus better at tasks and encourage us to be more nurturing.

A Social Life

The Animal Crossing series predates the ease of online play that we are all used to now, yet it is a social game at heart. Whether your WiFi is turned on or off, Animal Crossing offers fun and wholesome social interactions.

I detailed above how Animal Crossing villagers are designed to be cute little critters that tug at our heartstrings. However, part of what makes them endearing is their personality. Animal Crossing villagers are programmed with a range of different personality traits, likes, dislikes, and catchphrases. While writing this, the lazy slob villager Crackle the pig told the fabulous and beautiful wolf Vivian how much he loves food, then proceeded to Naruto run away from her. I couldn’t help but burst out laughing at how ludicrous the whole thing was.

A common misconception is the idea that introverts dislike social contact while extraverts love it. While socialising does indeed come more naturally to extraverts, introverts are simply more shy and reserved and experience social burnout more easily (Jung, 1967; Michielsen et al., 2004). While introverts may still want social contact, they may be too exhausted to engage in it. Thanks to modern technology, introverts are able to play online games and speak to friends online to maintain social contact, and extraverts can also use these methods to gain the social contact they desire (Kraut et al., 2002; Hu et al., 2017; Reer & Krämer, 2017).

Since Animal Crossing: Wild World, players have had the ability to visit each other’s towns and islands. This can enhance our social lives in two ways.

First of all, it allows us to connect and spend time with our friends and family from the comfort of our own home. This is especially helpful in the current worldwide situation, with friends even organising Animal Crossing weddings for those who have had to cancel their wedding. Animal Crossing helps us stay connected and make precious memories with our loved ones, which is helpful for both introverts and extraverts. The user-friendly and basic nature of the game means that there is a low barrier to entry, so we could theoretically play with our parents and grandparents while in isolation.

Secondly, Animal Crossing has a bustling and multifaceted online community. Whether you’re trading items, engaging in the stalk market (the series’ humorous take on the stock market), or just inviting people to hang out at your island, there are many opportunities to make new friends in the Animal Crossing community. The benefits of playing games with others online has been highlighted in research by Cole and Griffiths (2007). They found that 75% of those surveyed made good friends due to playing online games, and 30% met a romantic partner through a game. These friendships are often of a high quality, with over one in three people stating that they talk to their online friends about problems that they wouldn’t talk to their offline friends about.

Animal Crossing can keep you entertained socially by engaging with and watching the antics of personality-filled animals, or it can be a relaxing and fun way to stay connected with loved ones or even meet new friends.

A Prosocial Life

Prosocial behaviour is defined as behaviour which helps or benefits others, potentially through self-sacrifice (Weinstein & Ryan, 2010). Similar to ‘A Social Life’, Animal Crossing has encouraged us to be our best selves both offline and online for years.

When you become very close friends with a villager, they will give you a framed photograph of themselves. These pictures are worthless in the game and contribute nothing to your core goals of paying off your loan, filling your museum etc., pretty much all you do is display them in your house.

Pictures are very serious business.

People dedicate a lot of time and resources to spoiling their favourite villagers. They send presents, write letters, and do everything they can to win the affection of their digital buddies. When the villager hands over their picture, it’s a sign that you are a great friend who is very kind and considerate. Getting a villager’s picture is often a moment of celebration that comes with a dopamine boost. You worked to achieve it, and that work involved copious amounts of kindness.

Now let’s move to the online world. As I alluded to above, Animal Crossing has its own version of the stock market known as the stalk market. This involves buying turnips on a Sunday morning, then watching the ‘stalk market’ prices change throughout the week and trying to sell your turnips at the highest possible price. Not everyone is lucky enough to have a high selling price, so people can open up their town or island to visitors and allow them to sell their turnips at a high price.

If the 140 attempts to catch a fish didn’t clue you in, I have notoriously bad luck when it comes to video games. This is why I didn’t personally buy turnips in Animal Crossing: New Leaf – I just knew I’d have horrible stalk market luck. However, checking stalk market prices in your town takes around five seconds at most when you’re already at the shop, so I’d check anyway out of curiosity.

One hideously warm day during my university summer vacation, I checked my stalk market price. The buying price was 560 bells per turnip. Imagine a zombie movie where the horde are banging down the barricaded door – that’s Animal Crossing players when there’s a selling price of 500 bells or higher.

I knew I’d never get a price like that again (and never have in seven years), so I did my duty to the Animal Crossing community – I opened the floodgates. I took a screenshot of my price for evidence and posted to a popular forum saying that I was welcoming guests. I made a last-minute addition to my message:

“Tips not necessary”

It’s common courtesy to give a cut of your profits to the person whose selling price you are using. I decided I didn’t really care about the tips, I just wanted to help out. I still have my notes from that day on my hard drive, and I spent over 12 hours adding people, organising people and letting people into my town in waves. Many people ignored the ‘tips not necessary’ part, and I swear there is one person who came in and just gave me all of the money they made from the trip. My actions that day helped people make millions, and I made millions from their kindness which I said wasn’t necessary.

Peoples’ dedication to helping other people make money isn’t the only example of prosocial behaviour in the Animal Crossing community. It’s pretty common for people to just give people items that they are looking for, be it fossils, furniture, paintings or more. These feats of kindness can be explained mainly in two ways.

In my most recent article on The Psychology of Video Game Mischief, I described how something known as Theory of Mind allows us to empathise with and take the perspective of others (Call & Tomasello, 1998). As Animal Crossing players, we understand and empathise with others who are trying to pay off their debt, expand their museum or create their fantasy home. We understand the struggle is real, and this understanding makes it more likely that we’re going to throw someone else a bone (or a fossil).

I’ve also previously explained how kindness isn’t necessarily its own reward. When we act in a selfless manner, our bodies produce the neurochemicals serotonin and dopamine (Breuning, 2015). These neurochemicals help us to feel happy, calm and good about ourselves (Harvard Medical School, 2010). When I added “tips not necessary” to my turnip selling message, I received a positive little boost because I was acting like a good and helpful person. The people giving me tips despite them not being necessary probably also received such a boost, so everybody wins.

An Entertaining Life

One day while fishing, I noticed Flip the monkey sadly walking around with a bubble saying “What should I do?” above his head. What happened? I dropped everything I was doing to go talk to him. It turns out that he had a fight with Mira the bunny and bought her a present to say sorry, but he was too afraid to give it to her. As the neutral party, I was tasked with delivering the present and mending their friendship.

Along with all of the benefits outlined above, Animal Crossing sometimes feels like you’re in a silly little soap opera. However, the player is responsible for how the events of the soap opera unfold. While the game generated a feud between Flip and Mira, I would have no idea about this if I didn’t go talk to Flip. I’m also the person responsible for mending their friendship as Flip was too scared and Mira is too stubborn.

The interactive nature of video games has led to them being described as ‘fiction machines’ (Tavinor, 2009). In fiction machines, the person playing the game is responsible for how the events of the game unfold. While the term ‘fiction machine’ could be applied to a range of different games, Animal Crossing has been given the unique name of an ‘interactive narrative machine’ (Milne-Plückebaum, 2014). Allow me to explain.

Perhaps the closest friendship on my island right now is between the VIP Bea and Felicity the cat. Felicity is flashy and loud and wants to be a world-famous popstar, while Bea is shy and loves nothing more than watering flowers and reading books. Their relationship reminds me a lot of the endearing trope of an extravert ‘adopting’ an introvert as their best friend. Seeing them hanging out together warms my heart and makes me smile.

The above paragraph is me reading far too much into two video game animals being in close proximity to one another. But this is your brain on Animal Crossing.

Fludernik (2009) argues that it is within our nature to create narratives in the world around us, just think of people-watching in public. They also argue that when we create these narratives, we often do so with “an individual point of view that’s tied to a subjective experience”. I have been the introvert that’s been adopted by an extravert, so I am more likely to insert this into a narrative that I create. Someone else might place more emphasis on how funny it is that a dog and a cat are best friends.

While Nintendo provides these characters with a personality and catchphrases, we can’t help but flesh out these characters with a narrative influenced by our own life experiences. Adding to the narrative and watching it unfold both allows us to be creative and immerses us in an entertaining world that’s personal to us.

I would like to conclude with one interesting point about interactive narrative machines that is important for the current anxiety epidemic. A cited reason why social anxiety is on the rise is because we fear being judged by others (La & Harrison, 2005). As painful as it is to type this, we’re probably living in the age where it’s easiest to be horrible to and about others. We don’t know which friendship groups, group chats or Discord servers are making fun of us or talking about us without our knowledge.

In the clothes shop Able Sisters, Sable the hedgehog quietly works at her sewing machine. She ignores you when you talk to her, and her sister informs you that she’s very shy and hard-working. When you say hello to her every day, she begins to open up to you, eventually wishing she had a cup of tea to welcome you with.

Our patience and kindness made Sable comfortable enough to talk and she becomes excited to see you. At the core of the interactive narrative machine is the fact that you are a kind and friendly person that everyone likes. You are the driving force behind the narrative of your island’s story because everyone likes you and is happy to see you.

In a world where you don’t know who’s saying what about you, Animal Crossing allows you to enter a world where you are loved for your kindness and people are happy to see you. And sometimes we really need that.

Summary

The number of people suffering from anxiety worldwide has led to anxiety being described as an “epidemic”. This is dangerous as the stress hormone cortisol produced when we are anxious can cause permanent damage to our body. According to Cognitive Load Theory, the large rotation of tasks available to those playing Animal Crossing keeps us too busy to think about our source of anxiety, reducing the production of cortisol. As our hands are busy while playing Animal Crossing, this also means we can’t engage in unhealthy stress responses such as skin picking or nail biting.

We can go a long time without experiencing major rewards in our life, so psychologists recommend that we incorporate small victories and goals into our everyday lives. Animal Crossing allows players to develop their own goals (e.g. designing a nice village) while also coming with many built-in goals (e.g. paying off housing debt). Meeting our goals in Animal Crossing triggers the production of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that helps us feel happy and calm.

You are often surrounded by adorable villagers in Animal Crossing that make you smile. These designs are made deliberately to make you want to nurture and care for your villagers and surroundings. However, there is an emerging body of evidence to suggest that getting your daily cute fix from Animal Crossing can encourage you to be more nurturing and attentive in real life.

These cute villagers come with their own personalities that can be hilarious to engage with or watch engage with other villagers. While a social game in the offline sense, developments in technology mean that you can also play Animal Crossing online with others. The user-friendly and easy nature of the game means that you can play with a wide range of people, including parents and grandparents. You can also meet new friends in the bustling online Animal Crossing community, and research indicates that these online friendships are often of a high quality that can offer psychological support.

Animal Crossing is a series that encourages you to be your most kind self both offline (e.g. showering villagers in gifts) and online (e.g. giving people items for free). When we are nice and kind to others, our body produces neurochemicals such as serotonin and dopamine that help us to feel happy and good about ourselves.

With the often wacky and comical dialogue of villagers, life in Animal Crossing can feel like a funny soap opera. Players often get creative when playing Animal Crossing and develop narratives with villagers that are personal to us and our life experiences; this has led to Animal Crossing being described as an “interactive narrative machine”. In this narrative machine, we take for granted that villagers love us and enjoy us for our kindness. In a world where an increasing number of us experience anxiety over being judged by others, Animal Crossing offers a welcome and loving reprieve.

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