For the Love of God, Stop Making Think Pieces About Animal Crossing Emma Bierbaum Follow Apr 23 · 4 min read

These are literally just animals.

It’s the midst of the Great Lockdown of 2020. We’re all stuck in our houses. We’re all bored. We’re all doing our best to keep ourselves from losing our minds. Some of us are playing video games, such as DOOM Eternal, Resident Evil, and Final Fantasy VII. Some of us are playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

And, some of us are writing think pieces about Animal Crossing.

I wouldn’t be writing this if I didn’t think there was a problem. In fact, I think Medium is one of the worst abominations on the internet. Anybody can make a Medium article and say whatever atrocious nonsense that they want. The professional formatting of the website makes it look like it was written by someone who has the credentials to do so instead of a random nobody who wants to word-vomit on the internet. With the number of these articles, I might just be adding to the problem.

But, I can’t take it anymore.

For the love of all that is holy, stop writing think pieces about Animal Crossing.

If you didn’t know anything about Animal Crossing and you stumbled upon an article, say Animal Crossing and the Normalization of Sexual Violence, you might think to yourself, “What on Earth is this game? Is it some furry shit? Should kids be playing this game?” No, it’s not some furry shit (unless you make it that way, you sinners), and yes, kids should be playing this game. Because it’s a game. For children. About animals. Who are your neighbors. That’s literally it. It’s a game where you live on an island, and you make friends with some motherfucking animals.

Of course, this must be something more insidious, right? If you believe PETA, then yes. Animal Crossing is very cruel to animals and the environment. You have to catch live animals? How horrifying. It’s simply not proper vegan behavior to catch fictional bugs and fish in a video game. Who knows what environmental impact this might have?

This one might be worse because it’s an official news story. The Independent is very concerned about the hypocrisy of hosting in-game events for Earth Day, while also having gameplay features that strip islands of their self-renewing resources, which you can then sell for profit. These are actions that children and young adults alike will certainly mimic and replicate in the real world once they are released from quarantine.

The capitalist scum tanuki Tom Nook advocates for the very nature he seeks to exploit.

There are dozens of articles that have a similar tone, some comparing New Horizons to Japanese colonialism and historical revisionism. Some are calling the Animal Crossing economy delusional and idyllic while comparing Tom Nook to real-life leaders such as Kim Jong-un:

There’s a comfort in its predictable capitalist economics. Your island home expansions are bankrolled by loans from Tom Nook, a racoon with droopy eyes, a patterned shirt and a bottomless money pit…He’s like a cross between the governor of the Bank of England and Kim Jong-un (his minions Timmy and Tommy even refer to him as their “fearless leader”).

Some are calling it straight up racist because of a screen capture of online gameplay in which the player entered a racial slur in their customizable catchphrase during testing of online features in Animal Crossing: Wild World for a new Wii game…that came out in…2008…

Image courtesy of ER Shepard

Do you see what I’m getting at here? I don’t know if it’s the quarantine or the tumultuous political climate, but actual grown adults, some with actual grown-up jobs, are chomping at the bit to insert political meaning into a game about talking animals.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not one of those “keep the politics out of video games” people. I actually think that all art is inherently political, including video games. However, it’s one thing to analyze a game like Final Fantasy VII, a Japanese role-playing game about a group of eco-terrorists trying to save the planet from an evil corporation, and it’s another to put this sort of treatment on a social simulation game where the most violence is committed when hitting your villagers with a net.

Sometimes, things are just fun.

You can analyze Animal Crossing all you want, but is it really helping anyone? In a time where our world feels like it’s falling apart around us, is calling Animal Crossing violent, racist, and neoliberal an observation that can inform people and push them towards change, or is it random people on the internet with too much time on their hands molding a children’s game to their agendas for ad revenue? I love analyzing media because it helps us understand complex ideas and apply them to real life, but at a certain point, it can become a pseudo-woke circle-jerk that is causing more harm than good.

I beg all of you — Medium authors, journalists, angry 20-somethings — if you think you have a hot take about Animal Crossing that you want to share with the world, just don’t. Instead, maybe even try the game yourself, have a glass of wine, listen to a K.K. Slider song.

Or, please, just do literally anything else.