Retrospective: Animal Crossing

When my children ask why monopolies are bad, I won't tell them about the robber barons or Murdoch and his ilk. I'll tell them about a snotty little raccoon who charged me crazy amounts for paint, and wouldn't even let me carouse in his shop after I'd paid up. Carousing, in fact, was expressly discouraged. My kids will learn a lot from me.

Nook has lead a lot of people to suggest that Animal Crossing is little more than a capitalism simulator: a toy-box treadmill away from your normal every day treadmill, a place where you spend your free time working to acquire tables and chairs and funny little doodads to fill out your pretend house.

From this perspective, it's a bleak game; a Diablo for soft furnishings, in which you divide your life between toiling for wages and frittering those wages away, and a game that serves only to remind you how stupid you are, selecting a form of play that looks so very much like work.

There's something to that, certainly, but it's possible that there's something beyond it, too. I've started to think that Animal Crossing has a deeper motive. I've started to think that it builds a rat race in order to give you the option to step away from it.

That was certainly my own experience with the game. I had a few heady weeks of enlarging my house, stuffing the basement with NES titles (Nintendo won't be doing anything like that again), collecting matching furniture, and trying to beat Stu in our flower-arranging arms race.

And then, as with real life, it all started to seem a bit hollow, and a bit embarrassing. After that, I still returned to Tristero every day, but now I did the things I wanted to do. I wandered around chatting to my grumpy frog neighbours, I meddled unmusically with the town anthem until I had achieved optimal terribleness, I wrote letters to Spike, pleading with him not to go, I requested tracks from KK Slider, and I planted pears and watched the shoots grow into trees.

I loved it all the more now, too, because I had made the time to do exactly this - and I was doing all this instead of getting annoyed about Stu's wallpaper, which really was quite something.

Eventually, the rest of the world caught up to Animal Crossing. On the DS, it became an enormo-hit, and so now even my little sister knows what an enormous dick Tom Nook is. Back then, though, it was a cherished GameCube secret (at times, it felt like the GameCube was a cherished GameCube secret, actually), and I'd no more buy a sequel to Tristero than I would buy a sequel to my own legs - even if my new legs came with a coffee shop run by a friendly pigeon who price-gouged me for imaginary Americanos.

Speaking of Tristero, I'm going to have to end this on a faintly melancholy note. Last weekend, I couldn't find that grey memory card anywhere, so I asked Stu if he had it. He did, he admitted, but he'd gone back to the village recently and found it filled with weeds, so he erased the whole thing.

The whole thing. I'm ashamed to say I felt worryingly bereft at the news. It's lucky I don't have a real job, like doctors or social workers. I'd expected to be able to visit Tristero for years to come.

I'd figured I'd show Tristero to my kids, to my grandkids. I'd even fantasized that - warning: I'm weird - millennia from now, my frail and frozen Earthling body would be found floating in space by extra-terrestrials, Frank Poole-style, and that I'd be thawed, patched up, and would get to jump-start Tristero on some super-advanced mainframe, so I could even show aliens what a dick Tom Nook is. After all that time, Mr Resetti would be reaaaaally pissed, too, I reckon.

That's not going to happen. Tristero's gone, Stu's now a web editor, and I now write about videogames. We aren't in our early 20s, sitting a few cubicles from one another, and we're too old to stay up until four to get Whisp to tidy our village for us. And yet, we still love Tristero. We love it so much, actually, that Stu would rather nuke it from orbit than see it buried in weeds.