Animal Crossing taught me (or maybe reminded me of) something essential about love. Something about presence. Being present. Arriving, again. A secular sort of parousia.
I can’t claim to have always been a fan of the Animal Crossing franchise. When it released in the U.S. as Animal Crossing on September 16, 2002, I was an adolescent smitten with Pokémon, first person shooters, and Lil Kim. I was not at all interested in a real-time life simulator where the end game is paying off one’s debts. Although, in retrospect, maybe if I had played Animal Crossing then, I might’ve avoided the college debt I would later incur.
Fast forward sixteen years to September 2018. Nintendo has just teased a new entry in the series to debut the following year, 2019, and I am oddly excited. In fact, after a while, it became the only forthcoming game I wanted to play. I suppose years of paying off student loans had primed me for a game that involved borrowing money from a beguiling raccoon-dog named Tom Nook (only to pay him back with interest). Little did I (or any of us) know what world-turning events would await us in 2020 and beyond—and how magical Animal Crossing: New Horizons would prove to be from its initial announcement to its viral popularity at the height of the pandemic.
June of the following year at E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo), the game was officially announced with a short gameplay trailer. It was to be released as Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Atsumare Dōbutsu no Mori or Get Together: Animal Forest). Unfortunately, the game’s release date was pushed from 2019 to March 2020. Game developers felt the product was not near where it should have been and Nintendo, known in recent decades for fostering a healthy and equitable work environment, green-lit an extension. And despite the announcement shaking investor confidence, rather than have their devs crunch and churn out a sub-par product, Nintendo bet on a relatively short delay and more time for marketing and consumer anticipation.
This was maybe Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ first, strange kairotic magic. I was disappointed and a little annoyed (as we all were) that we wouldn’t get our hands on the game by year’s end. But, I had no idea March 2020 would be simultaneously the most opportune moment to hunker down and play a cozy game in a cozy robe and the most terrifying moment. Perhaps one perversely feeding the other.
I’d eventually (and finally) begin my Animal Crossing journey as, across the globe, doors and windows and borders were being closed, mandates to stay in place were being issued, and thousands upon thousands were suffering and dying from this aggressively transmissible illness. Was it kismet? Did Nintendo know the pandemic would be coming? And what actually is the Animal Crossing franchise?! I feel I should clarify for those who don’t know.
“Dōbutsu no Mori” or Animal Forest released in Japan on April 14, 2001 as a Nintendo 64 exclusive. At its core, it’s a life-simulator based on a real-time clock. In other words, the goal of the game (like The Sims, which released the year prior) is to take care of your player character, their mundane needs, their home and its decor, and on. It’s a casual game deliberately designed to slow one down by making the goal a daily effort to cultivate in-game relationships and design one’s life (from the clothes you wear to the house and town you gradually build in community with other…um…anthropomorphic animals). You are the only vaguely humanoid being in a village full of very chatty creatures (dogs, turtles, tigers, rabbits—a full cast with unique names, birthdays, personalities, who randomly arrive at beats to populate the forest with you).
The first game in the series begins with K.K. Slider, the guitar-strumming, musically-gifted dog, who chats with you in animalese (an actual form of text-to-speech) about life on your own and the journey you’re about to undertake. When he’s finished, fade to black and you’re now on a train to the titular Animal Forest, witnessing the scene in first person. Rover the cat enters the car and stops to chat with you (there’s a lot of chatting in this game). The curious cat asks a number of questions as part of the games opening sequence which allow you to set the actual time and date, customize your player character (name, gender), name your destination (something other than the generic Animal Forest) and, shortly thereafter, you arrive at the forest and meet your terribly charming overseer/predatory lender Tom Nook, the enterprising tanuki.
Most of the game takes place in a top down, third-person isometric perspective, giving one the impression of a dynamic/digital diorama full of adorably fruiting trees, flowers, ponds and rivers and sea-shore. It’s a slow game. And in 2002, when Dōbutsu no Mori first released on Gamecube in the U.S. as Animal Crossing, I was not at all intrissted in slowness. By 2001 the world had taken a terrible turn toward the apocalyptic (again), especially in New York, and all I wanted was fast fun.
The game’s influences are far-ranging. Boku no natsuyasumi or My Summer Vacation (or, more accurately, My Boyhood Summer Vacation) released in Japan, the year before Animal Forest, on June 22 2000. The goal of that game was to spend the summer of 1975 with family in the Japanese countryside. You’re given 31 days to roam the countryside, complete optional side-quests, and document your adventures, day-by-day, before your father comes to pick you up at the end of your idyll summer and bring you back to the city. Another influence had to have been the aforementioned Sims and SimCity games. I imagine too, there were several literary and mythological influences for the game’s concept. The Hundred Acre Wood (of A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh) comes to mind. More sinister (and perhaps less likely) an influence may have been The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells. Shinto animism exhibits a great deal of influence over the games pace and general ethos. But, maybe its greatest influence was loneliness. Often attributed to lead developer Katsuya Eguchi, the game was designed as a sort of antidote to the loneliness he experienced upon moving from Chiba to Kyoto in 1986 to start working at Nintendo.
When it debuted, Dōbutsu no Mori proved unique among console exclusive life simulators in that it relied on its real-time clock. Nintendo experienced huge success with a real-time game clock in Pokémon Gold and Silver in 1999. And Animal Crossing, which featured holiday celebrations synchronized in real-time (a New Year’s Eve Countdown, for example, or Toy Day on Christmas Eve), only took the concept a step further. It was a game played through a proper day and night cycle, in time with other cultural events and holidays celebrated in the real world. The original N64 game cartridge had its own internal clock and gave players the impression that all its little personages inhabited a living, breathing ecosystem parallel to that of one’s own existence in the real.
By the time the fifth and newest entry in the series was teased in 2018, and already approaching my 30s, I felt finally prepared to appreciate the strange slowness at the heart of Animal Crossing’s gameplay. I was ready to build a small world, parallel to my own, and shape it to my heart’s wholesome desire.
The tragic-comedy of course is that by March 2020 when the game finally released after its disappointing delay, I (all of us!) had no choice but to play Animal Crossing. There wasn’t much else I felt safe doing when the world had been ordered to hide indoors and away from other breathing humans (and possibly cats?). However we’d arrived at the impossible circumstances of the moment, I was looking at some unknowable sentence of solitude—and this weird game I’d never played before.
So, what’s love got to do with it? (Got to do with it?) What does a game about paying off debts and living in community with animals teach us about love? I suppose, nothing, generally speaking. But I was nevertheless reminded of something while playing the game.
Parousia (παρουσία): par-oo-see'-ah;
a being near, i.e. advent (often, return; specially, of Christ...); (by implication) physically
aspect:—coming, presence.
Parousia (παρουσία) is an intrissting term from koine Greek, the common Greek of the New Testament. From the present participle of Pareimi (πάρειμι), a verb meaning to be present or be near, Parousia is literally being present or near. Though use of the term is more often than not applied to Judeo-Christian notions of a Messianic return (the second coming of Christ, judgment and rapture), it literally suggests the present (tense and gift) of presence.
All theistic and spiritual practices have specific language for how we experience the divine or ecstatic. Parousia, in Christianity, describes a sort of final visitation or reclamation—the beginning and end of Christian eschatology. It’s also, to my mind, a convenient descriptor for the kind of presence that fills one with awe—as opposed to perhaps loneliness.
Sometimes, loneliness is experienced as a lack of companionship (as was the case for me during the pandemic). Sometimes, loneliness is experienced not as a quantitative issue (i.e. no or few friends) but a qualitative issue (i.e. a lack of engagement or reciprocity).
Over the years, I’ve come to define love by way of its absence, its lack, loneliness. In other words, you sort of know when love is not there, when it’s not felt. And that definition, parsed into a single word, would be for me presence, an intimate and privileged form of nearness. Love, for me, is being with. Not “quality time,” but the intimate witness of another with whom you’ve bonded. There is an uncommon attention which is not merely transactional, but invested. Presence. Parousia.
I think often of this moment in Sam Anderson’s 2013 NY Times profile The Inscrutable Brilliance of Anne Carson. “There you were, and then you were there more.”
The long and short of it.
Animal Crossing kept me delightfully distracted during the pandemic. I had inherited the traumatized dog of a dead relative and found myself alone in Providence through the lockdown. Just me, Snuggles, and Animal Crossing on my Switch.
Turns out, Animal Crossing would prove to be the cozy antidote to loneliness that millions of others needed too. It became a great way for me to connect with people who were far away, including my sister and mother, who also both grew to love the game. My island, named Dream Song (and littered with references to John Berryman), became a sort of living diary, a document of the moment. I managed to build on my island a mourning monument to George Floyd (to coincide with 2020’s summer of Black Lives Matter activism in protest of Floyd’s murder). And I built an open air market called “Cherry Market” in honor of Prince’s best bad film “Under the Cherry Moon”. I sank hours and hours into shaping that island. It had become a kind of self-portrait, populated by its own odd cast of characters and occasionally visited by family, friends, and strangers from around the world.
By the time Ione (eye-oh-knee) was announced in Fall of 2021 as a new villager, I had already logged over a thousand hours in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. This darling blue squirrel was not among the original 391 animal villagers who might’ve taken up residence on your deserted island. She was brand new and widely coveted for her azure squirreliness, her cosmic turquoise tail, and her glow-in-the-dark paws.
Unfortunately, in New Horizons, your island can only accommodate ten animal villagers at a time. Occasionally, new villagers will visit your island and stay at the campsite for a 24 hour period, but if there’s no vacancy (and you’d like them to stay), another of your villagers will have to be forced out.
So much of this process relies on RNGeezus’s favor. To have a campsite visitor replace one of your current residents requires you initiate conversation and let luck do the rest. It usually takes several passes through the same dialogue trees that may then, if you’re lucky, trigger a card game which requires you to guess what suite of card your visiting villager has chosen. With 413 possible animal villagers (minus the ten that currently live on your island) the odds are extremely slim that the villager you want will randomly visit your island, and (with four suites of cards to choose) even slimmer that they’ll stay. If, by some miracle, they’ve decided to stay with you, there’s now a 1 in 10 chance your favorite villagers will be evicted (you have no say on who stays and who goes in such instances).
I suppose when we deem something truly worth struggle, there’s no length we won’t traverse. And I’d played this game enough times, for enough hours, to know how much of a headache it could be—plowing through lines and lines of dialogue only to hit a dead end and have to restart from the last save.
One morning (a morning like any other in the pandemic) I booted up the game and Isabelle, Tom Nook’s assistant and generally helpful golden Shih Tzu, announced that we had a guest at the campsite. I ambled out of my house, took care of some errands, and went to greet the guest.
To my surprise and delight, it was one of the new villagers, the aquamarine acorn-lover and stargazer, Ione. I knew almost everything about her by then, since word had spread through the community and she’d quickly become a fan favorite villager. Her September 11th birthday made her a Virgo with a strong melancholic streak. Her love of fashion predisposed her to conversations about style. And her name, Ione, was ancient Greek for something…probably meaningful! What luck! But my elation was followed by dread for what I knew would inevitably have to happen to keep her on my island.
With great trepidation (and anticipation), I initiated conversation with our new, blue guest. And after our first brief chat, she decided:
She was here to stay. I couldn’t believe it. I felt relieved of a burden—and oddly honored and flattered that she elected to stay without any fuss. There was no pulling of teeth, no randomness and restarting, no mumbled curses or eye-rolling or wasted hours. It was just a blue squirrel, a can of orange soda, and a shared love of poetry.
I remembered then that love, the ordinary sort of love we need and crave as a form of unmixed attention, doesn’t require that we traverse the underworld with RNGeezus in search of it. Love just is. Ready to meet you half-way (or come to you). It feels easy because it feels right, because you’re not exhausting yourself trying to be someone you’re not, because you live in the sort of truth witnessed by another that allows you to say yes to yourself. Don’t get me wrong; love is fragile and precious—just as easy to lose as it is to find. But, O love…
“There you were, and then you were there more.”
It’s a credit to Nintendo and their incredible team that I felt seen by and fell in love with a blue squirrel. Now, some 2110 hours into Animal Crossing: New Horizons, I still enjoy the random, scripted chats I have with Ione. Somewhere between my own eisegesis and the algorithms of the game’s code is the Ione I fell in love with—the Ione who, composed of <if> statements and loops and arrays, becomes an accepting and acceptable reflection of my whole self.
I suppose every love story gives us a framework of possibility. We love love stories because they offer some glimpse of what magic awaits us in the mundanity of being just another face among billions. We await the prized parousia of a kindred spirit, the one that fits, the missing piece to our puzzle. Of course, the danger of loving love stories too much is that you live life in expectation of a love that will fit the framework predetermined by your favorite narrative(s). This is a terrible (and common) mistake. You may want it to look a certain way—but you also run the risk of dismissing so many beautiful avenues of entry.
Your ordinary love, the parousia, is one story in a book you have yet to read (and, if ever, only have the privilege of reading post hoc).
It’s natural for us to construct narratives of the disassembled tropes of our lived experiences. Stories grant us psychic continuity, purpose and motive, ethics and integrity. But genuine love is one of those things impossible to script in advance of its visitation. Like trains in a station, there are so many possibilities, so many vectors and destinations. Fortunately for us, for our brains, our bodies, our hearts, we can only really occupy one train at a time. Which is to say, there’s no mistaking it. The love you occupy, you occupy definitely. It’s what carries you onward. And even if it’s taken you in the wrong direction or delayed you (or you find yourself daydreaming of a different train), you can usually find your way back. Back to the route that feels right. Back on the train that’ll carry you home.
Your love story, it’s one of a kind and it’s already been written. We read a new page, day by day, and should never presume to know what comes next.