My landscaping resembles the pair of Holes. The host of a Netflix gardening show could issue a begrudging nod toward Animal Crossing Bells my garden before they venture on a half-buried tire on their way out and creep to a bramble of all unpruned weeds.
Widely lauded--such as by WIRED--as the ideal pastime for this quarantine moment, Animal Crossing: New Horizons must imply to be relaxing. It has the telltale signs animals talking in mumblesqueaks, blossoms, a island guitar soundtrack everywhere. I chase a blossom that is blue or will fish on the beachfront. I put a picnic basket along the edge of the river and can dye my hair pink. There are not any threats, except a couple of choice insects, and that I can not even drop off a hillside. Every and every one is lined by invisible bowling bumpers.
And yet Animal Crossing: New Horizons is relaxing to me the way a luxury Maui resort may be relaxing--the type where at-attention employees taxi $20 cocktails into your stinging-hot metal beach seat atop 500 truckloads of stolen white sand. I sit out in sunlight, becoming more and more intoxicated, but the burning off stops, and the bill just keeps getting steeper.
Is it feasible to feel so unrelaxed in Animal Crossing? I have wondered that for hours, throwing my mind against the match repetitive dialog, frustrating mechanics, and obsession with debt bondage in hunt for an enduring dopamine high. And while I've enjoyed small bursts of joy--a new fish species, a present dropped out of a balloon! --in the end, Animal Crossing has only felt like the mill, charmingly reskinned.
Once you arrive, a tanuki called Tom Nook, founder and president of Nook Inc., who sold you the package, explains what you can do that to unwind: upgrade your tent into a home, decorate that home, craft resources, mine materials, create furniture.
So you operate. You knock against gems, shovel against grime, and if these axes and shovels break, as they constantly do this quickly, you create yourself a brand new one with rush. You can also play with the Stalk Market, and wait hours at a line of hundreds of other players to sell turnips at great rates.
Through savvy funding and hard work, players may create or buy enough items to express themselves in Animal Crossing. And impressively they do. The internet is littered with replicas of the Jardins du Chateau de Versailles and screenshots of Animal Crossing zen gardens. I visit millennial pink houses teeming with succulents worthy of tea and a rooms all prepped for the Queen. I can't get the facts on that muumuu over and adore your maid outfit. I am impressed, even a bit jealous.
Slowly inching toward the flower it rests, I place my web just so before slamming it down and, somehow, grab myself an imperceptible cherry blossom petal instead. My web fractures, along with the locust disappears into the brush. I must craft a web. Racing my island round, drop shakes every tree until five wood branches. I return home to my workbench buy Animal Crossing Items. When I go back outside, net in hand, a second locust catches my eye. I move toward it. I attentively aim, triangulating about the damn thing such as a warship missile, and sink down the net. I overlook. The locust is gone.