Animal Crossing’s massive popularity has made it less like paradise and more like Wall Street

[tonghuan]

Due to social alienation and quarantine, they spend hours of extra time. New players in Nintendo’s “Animal Crossing: New Horizons”, such as Ash Wolf (also known as Ninji on Twitter), are attracted by the slow and laid back Animal Crossing Bells In this way, they can build idyllic islands, decorate houses, visit friends and so on.

Wolf said: "People use it as a means of escape." "When I first played the game, I joked that it was actually the only thing in my life that gave me structure."

However, the influx of new users has produced unexpected changes. Compared with Wall Street, the quiet speed of the game has been readjusted to a fast-paced player.

Animal Crossing is not actually designed for such games, it deliberately slows down players. However, the gaming community became obsessed with optimization, and in the process developed features designed to encourage daily progress. Now that they have become a major part of the audience, they have discovered vulnerabilities or strategies to get rich quickly.

What happens when gamers focused on efficiency conflict with the system? For "animal crossing", this means changing from a "survival on demand" paradise to a competitive economy. The influx of players affected the trading system and led to inflation. Others have created new tools to help them make money and simplify in-game trade. But these tools will feed back to the same problems, and even bring their own risks, including the risk of disrupting the natural balance expected by the game.

 Everything starts with two things: money and trade. Animal Crossing has never been a game of getting rich fast. In fact, the current chief designer of game design studio ArenaNet, Jennifer Scheurle, said that this design guides the player Buy Nook miles Ticket, who has been engaged in games such as "Guild Wars 2" and "Space Objects".

She said: "This brings you literal barriers to ensure that you don't burn all the content it provides." "I think the design of the game should be slow and focused, and mindfulness should be kept in mind."