Like many others, I played a lot of Animal Crossing: New Horizons over the pandemic. In this game, you are an island representative, working hard to pay off loans, befriend villagers, and decorate the island.
Some defining mechanics of Animal Crossing include crafting or buying furniture, catching fish and bugs, and collecting resources. Some resources are limited by the real world time. For example, each rock can only be mined for ore once per day. At the same time, you know that these resources will always be renewed the next day.
These limited and predictable resources result in a “dailies” dynamic, where every time you log in for the day, you have a checklist of tasks to perform (mine rocks, chop trees, dig for fossils, check the shop). From this dynamic, I find Animal Crossing to be a form of abnegation. The daily routine is familiar but also important, because resources can only be collected today. Animal Crossing serves as a way for me to escape into a world where I don’t have to make any high-stakes decisions. Instead, I can cross off a prewritten checklist of important island tasks with the mere press of a few buttons.
