Read: You already live in quarantine

Days pass in real time, and the seasons change too, along with the calendar. You can fish and catch bugs, plant trees or chop them down for wood. You can buy clothing, furniture, and other goods, or do odd jobs for the animals who live in town. You can work off that infernal mortgage, of course, but you can also choose not to, and Tom Nook will never evict you. Instead, you might bury treasure on the beach, or just watch the stars at night. In summer, the crickets chirp at dusk. When spring blooms, as it is now, the wind makes cherry blossoms dance over the streams.

The whole time my kid with the video-game mortgage was growing up, I insisted in books and during lectures and on late-night shows that games like Animal Crossing could help people better understand other big problems, like climate change or even pandemic flu (a topic I later turned into a game, not that it made much of a difference). Today, my son is about to graduate from college and into the economic cataclysm that will likely become the coronavirus depression. He’s back home now, because his school closed down, playing the new Animal Crossing with the rest of us. Its lessons don’t seem so useful anymore.

Maybe I had it all wrong all those years ago. I had imagined Animal Crossing to be a game about the world, one that offered ingenious, if abstract, life lessons. But the players enjoying it in quarantine celebrate it for escapism, which any form of entertainment might provide. Neither interpretation seems quite right. Even though it can function as escapism, Animal Crossing isn’t a fantasy-world replacement from real life, absent all its burdens. But nor is it a handbook for how to live in actual reality more effectively—the most distinctive aspect of mortgage lending, after all, is the crushing weight of compounding interest, which enriches lenders that get bailouts if they fail. None of that stuff appears in the game at all.

Instead, Animal Crossing is a political hypothesis about how a different kind of world might work—one with no losers. Millions of people already have spent hours in the game stewing on that idea since the coronavirus crisis began.

Sequestered at home on lockdown, the NYU Game Center professor Naomi Clark recently offered a compelling reading of Animal Crossing to her students and colleagues, many of whom probably have been playing it to pass the time. The game, she argued, is a nostalgic fantasy for the Japanese furusato, a pastoral hometown.* Before industrialization, a seaside fishing village or hillside paddy-field farm might have sustained a simple, deliberate life of basic subsistence and straightforward agricultural trade, much like the life the player leads in Animal Crossing.

Read: We need to stop trying to replicate the life we had