Exploring Animal Crossing: Law, Culture and Business

Exploring Animal Crossing

Exploring Animal Crossing

Law, Culture and Business

Bruce Baer Arnold

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2024

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

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© Bruce Baer Arnold 2024

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book has been requested.

2024935136

ISBN-13: 978-1-83998-006-0 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-83998-006-0 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

1. Introduction

Eight Views of Animal Crossing

Exploring Virtuality, Money, Rules and Happiness

Digital World Making

How the Book Is Arranged

Resources for Understanding Animal Crossing

2. Origins and Owners

Genealogies of Production

The Nintendo Switch

Owners and Unknowns

3. The Animal Crossing Experience

Screen Play

Scripts

It Takes a Village

Slow Time

Exhibition

4. Sociability in a Virtual World

Everyone Needs a friend

Expression

Sociability as Playing Nicely

Learning to Play

Governance

Comforts

5. The Curation Economy

Collecting, Not Clashing

Useful Toil

Social Capital

Simulation

Subversion and Facilitation

6. Island Cultures

Defoe’s Island

Expressing Individuality and Belonging

Performativity

Cute, Commercial and Coopted

Inflection and Localisation

Capital and Its Discontents

7. Law in a Virtual World

Soft Law

Norms and Forms

Social and Other Contracts

Properties and Power

Gazes

8. Conclusion

Playscapes

Money and Love

Utopias

Futures

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book originated as a discussion with Katie Ley at her kitchen table, the site of several submissions to law reform inquiries and contributions to books during the COVID-19 Winter of 2020. I am indebted, as always, to Katie for her acuity, warmth and superb food while I was sheltering under her roof. Errant interpretations in the following pages are not attributable to Katie. I also appreciate the encouragement provided by Drew, Damon, Justin and Milo.

The book owes much to peers as exemplary law teachers and researchers. Constitutional scholar Bede Harris introduced me to the law and provided invaluable guidance regarding my doctoral dissertation on the law of identity.

As with all of my writing, I am indebted to Dr Wendy Bonython for encouragement, critical reading, a model of academic integrity, good humour. Her always gracious hospitality over several months in 2020–21 was exemplary. Eric’s contribution to the writing process was both unique and valued. Tess Rooney, Kate and Evie asked hard questions. Bill Orr and Jane Diedricks gave me courage during the COVID Winters. Susan Barnett and Charlie Rooney provided coffee and invaluable banter. Hamish Jennett talked to me about Heidegger. Missy Oberg offered her unique perspective.

This book is independent of Nintendo and other commercial entities. It is dedicated to Milo Meowington DD and Casper Bonython.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

Eight Views of Animal Crossing

A world of talking animals and haute couture, trade and Japanese tea houses, lovingly tended gardens, seasonal weather and sociability, self-fashioning and construction. A world that offers insights about performance, global audiences, intellectual property, gift giving, contract law and play in virtual environments. A world that affirms creativity and non-violent sociability, in contrast to digital platforms that embody destruction, mayhem, toxic masculinity and a hyper-kinetic ‘kill or be killed’ ethos. A world that has enchanted millions of people across the globe – a validation of the world maker’s capability – and has attracted diverse demographics on the basis of personal recommendations rather than extensive advertising. A world that gained scholarly attention as a consequence of uptake by consumers in many parts of the world as a source of comfort and delight during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This book explores that world, the world of Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It offers a transdisciplinary view of a cultural and commercial phenomenon, including a study of law relating to the operation of Animal Crossing and the virtual world’s users.

It is written by an Australian academic with an interest in the interaction of commerce, culture, consumption and law. That interaction is on a global and local scale: from billion-dollar sales to the varying experiences of individual players. The transdisciplinary approach means that it is not intended as a textbook for media and game studies scholars or for lawyers concerned with, for example, intellectual property as a focus of global trade disputes and the dynamics of consumer engagement with copyright. Instead, it resembles two of Japan’s iconic cultural productions: Hokusai’s 1830–1832 Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji and Kurosawa’s 1950 Rashomon.

Both Kurosawa and Hokusai offer multiple accounts – different, conflicting and engaging perspectives – of a single landscape or event. They have been emulated by non-Japanese artists, film-makers and authors. The persuasiveness of understanding through different views means that media and communication specialists have come to refer to the ‘Rashomon Effect’ as a shorthand for understanding complexity through a non-linear narrative and conflicting claims regarding truths.¹

In the following chapters, the author accordingly offers eight ‘views’ of Animal Crossing: different perspectives regarding a complex and dynamic cultural and commercial phenomenon. Those views overlap. Rather than an introduction to game studies or a standard account of a globalised business, the mechanics or psychology of digital game consumption or different regulatory frameworks (copyright, censorship, privacy, contract, digital money-laundering and antitrust), this book offers insights about the specific digital platform and life online by highlighting different aspects and pointing to a range of resources.

The book is independent of Nintendo. Reference to trade-marked product and corporate names does not represent an affiliation with or endorsement by Nintendo, Lego, Sega, Microsoft and other entities.

Exploring Virtuality, Money, Rules and Happiness

The following chapters are unashamedly exploratory. They are neither a tombstone, nor a vision of the latest brave new world nor a doctoral dissertation. They do not purport to offer a unique theoretical or empirical analysis from within a games studies discipline or study of how Animal Crossing functioned during the COVID-19 pandemic and its success as requirements for physical isolation were relaxed.

It is important to acknowledge that in referring to the global uptake of New Horizons, the digital platform (hardware, software, connectivity) is a product of and for the Global North, a characterisation analogous to what used to be dubbed the ‘Advanced Economies’, the ‘West’ or ‘First World’. Digital games embedded in a battery-powered handheld device without the need for connectivity are found in many countries, including parts of the Global South where electricity supply may be erratic and water supply is uncertain. Nintendo’s growth was reliant on the manufacture of such devices and the development of games that were device specific, a history discussed in the following chapter. New Horizons presupposes a global and national legal order that will ensure the development and maintenance of the sophisticated telecommunication networks needed for connecting players with the virtual world’s owner, alongside formal rules and social norms that facilitate certainty of payment and inhibit disregard of property rights or the range of activities often conceptualised as computer crime.

As the title suggests, this book offers a scholarly exploration of law, culture and business regarding New Horizons, the latest iteration of the increasingly successful Animal Crossing multiplayer digital platform² owned by the Japanese corporation Nintendo.

The work can be read as an independent, sometimes critical but often admiring, view of a large-scale virtual space (aka simulation on a digital platform, accessed via a proprietary device) that is utilised by individuals and corporations for pleasure and profit.³ As with the feature film industry and mass-market publishing, that profit enables the pleasure.⁴ The hedonics has a commercial basis in which Nintendo as proprietor and individual consumers of the product across the globe ‘co-produce’ the experience.

Animal Crossing is thus qualitatively different from many traditional games, such as Checkers, Go or Chess, where items used in play might be handmade by players or repurposed (e.g. checkers ‘made’ from leftover bottle caps). Its functioning is predicated on Nintendo’s pursuit of profit, player access to digital networks and the complex suite of laws explored in Chapter 7.

In contrast to many books and articles by games studies scholars, this volume looks at different aspects of Animal Crossing as a commercial product from a post-industrial corporation, an entity where production more closely resembles that in a traditional factory than the creativity of an extraordinarily talented individual such as Beethoven, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Picasso or Leonard Cohen. As with the golden eras of film and broadcast television, there is value in considering business models that bring together proprietors (a digital version of studios controlling the US exhibition system before the 1954 antitrust unbundling and the commercial broadcast networks before the current Age of YouTube, TikTok and Netflix), commercial partners and consumers located in diverse jurisdictions.⁵

Entertainment industries and audiences

Reference to the film and television sectors is relevant because although we often read film in terms of auteurs or iconic works, the two industries – just like the current digital games industry – included small enterprises but were dominated by large content producers. Production was factory-style on an industrial scale for global audiences rather than by isolated artisanal developers. Industrial scale meant that the producers were able to influence governments to develop international and domestic legal frameworks that were in corporate interests, a persuasiveness highlighted in Chapter 7’s discussion of the film and software industries’ shaping of the fundamental agreement on trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights (TRIPS).

Benchmarking against past moving image production is also relevant because output that we now consider to be culturally significant was often less commercially successful than ephemeral dramas. Much early film and television content as private property has been lost through misplaced cost-saving or misadventure, the same fate as many early computer games. The concluding chapter of this book notes the potential for Animal Crossing and other highly successful digital worlds to be lost to future generations because of the cost and technical challenges of archiving.

Online games potentially generate large sales and large profits, alongside deep consumer loyalty to brands (one reason that scale is important) and specific games (with consumers purchasing successive iterations of a favoured game). That is exemplified by Microsoft’s US$68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, finalised in October 2023. Digital games are very big business. As an example of post-industrial commerce, they are typically more profitable than traditional ‘metal-bashing’ sectors such as shipbuilding and automobile manufacture in which individual corporations such as General Motors, Kawasaki Heavy Industries and Fuji Steel were regarded as ‘national champions’ and accordingly privileged in national economic planning.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II – an Activision game – for example, brought in US$1 billion within ten days of release. For perspective, that figure was equivalent to sales over a month of Top Gun: Maverick (the highest-grossing film of 2022).⁶ Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption 2 similarly grossed US$725 million over the week of release in 2018. The game had aggregate sales of 57 million units by November 2023; Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto 5 had 190 million units, with estimated profits of around US$6 billion (roughly double with aggregate returns for Gone with the Wind after adjustment for inflation).

Animal Crossing: New Horizons had less spectacular sales on immediate release but grossed US$2 billion over the year 2021, dwarfing the sales of many novels and movies. In late 2022, Nintendo sold 10 million Pokémon games for its Switch device – discussed in Chapter 2 – within the first three days of release. By September 2022, over 77 million Amiibo toys, which communicate with the Switch and often enhance the functionality of New Horizons, had been sold. Those figures highlight that revenue in the digital games sector is multidimensional (just like film and television), with sales coming from collectables, clothing and other ‘merch’, devices and the games themselves – all of which are subject to legal frameworks.

The commercial success of businesses such as Microsoft, Activision Blizzard and Nintendo – alongside connectivity providers such as AT&T and Verizon in the United States, BT in the United Kingdom and Optus in Australia – requires the law mentioned above. Although that law is often construed as narrowly punitive, or ignored apart from inconveniences represented by copyright, it can be understood as a dynamic mechanism for the coordination of different entities. Without that coordination, we would not have the enjoyment provided by Animal Crossing and, on reflection, any readily shared insights in work such as this book.

This book also suggests that there is value in considering performance in a profit-oriented virtual world, in other words, an online theatrical stage in which Nintendo as proprietor facilitates expression by individual users of each person’s persona rather than passive observation of characters acting out a script (and in costumes and scenery) over which the individual consumer has no control. That co-production results in what Trevor Strunk, one of the more persuasive games theorists, characterises as something worthy of consideration as an art object rather than digital ephemera without aesthetic value.⁷

Sociability in a digital space

This book can be read as a celebration of the sociability in Nintendo’s version of the ‘walled garden’, a curated virtual space that has not manifested the problems voiced by critics of AOL’s space⁸ and Disney’s Club Penguin⁹ more than a decade ago, the antisocial behaviour that was a hallmark of Second Life¹⁰ or the disinformation and aggression evident in contemporary platforms such as Facebook,¹¹ TikTok¹² and X (formerly Twitter).¹³ Sociability, explored in Chapter 4, involves adherence to norms regarding interpersonal activity and expression, including formal and tacit rules or expectations regarding speech, sharing, trust, aggression and courtesy. X and Animal Crossing are both corporate spaces. Only one is increasingly characterised by ethnoreligious vilification, egregiously fake news regarding health and politics, misogyny, homophobia and financial scams.¹⁴

The unforced sociability in Animal Crossing contrasts with earlier corporate worlds – artificial paradises – such as Disneyland (and examples of ‘new urbanism’ such as Celebration and Seaside where corporate rules are quietly subverted by individual property owners),¹⁵ something discussed later in this book.

It also contrasts with likely behaviour in ambitious proposals from Mark Zuckerberg and other entrepreneurs for an all-embracing metaverse,¹⁶ a virtual world or ‘world of worlds’ whose dystopian nature is not sanitised by rebadging of Facebook as Meta Platforms in 2022¹⁷ or disregard of claims that it will fundamentally reinforce existing digital divides.¹⁸

The book can further be read as an engagement with what might be dubbed slow gaming, a manifestation alongside slow food and slow education of a ‘slow movement’ that affirms a social connection and mindfulness that is not reliant on noise, distraction and the ephemeral¹⁹ or the inescapable discipline of a workplace clock in a ‘tyranny of metrics’.²⁰ The following chapters do not embrace the critique of speed, simulation and spectacle offered by postmodernists such as Virilio, Baudrillard and Deleuze.²¹

Platform pasts and futures

The following chapters reflect the author’s research and consulting over the past three decades regarding digital content creation, the interaction of cultural institutions with marketers and behaviour online in environments where design features might facilitate harm such as bullying or damage to virtual assets and where norms set by peers might foster or inhibit antisocial activity such as theft of tokens in networked quest games,²² the emblematic attack by flying phalli in Second Life or assault in LambdaMoo.²³

Academics and executives grappling with the current enthusiasm for virtual learning and remote-working platforms as a response to COVID-19 might recall, wryly or otherwise, that Second Life was at one time hyped as the future of virtual play, commerce and learning.²⁴ Animal Crossing has not attracted the same critical attention but iterations appear likely to enjoy a somewhat greater longevity, for reasons identified below.

Rules and regimes

This book is the first transdisciplinary book-length study of Animal Crossing: New Horizons and indeed appears to be the first English-language scholarly book specifically regarding that world. The absence of extensive scholarly literature specifically on Animal Crossing, discussed below, may be a reflection of scholarly condescension or research funding and media opportunities.²⁵ What have been variously characterised as computer games or videogames were until recently seen as less worthy of critical acclaim than film and accordingly resulted in negligible archival activity²⁶ and a shallower academic resource base, with fewer works for emulation.²⁷ Violent online games (and perceptions that violent games shape vulnerable consumers) unsurprisingly gain more attention from regulators, criminologists and legal scholars concerned with harms, ethics, censorship and moral panics than a virtual world without fatalities, spectacular injury and stylised simulations of law-breaking.²⁸

The following chapters are not intended as an exhaustive report from a particular disciplinary perspective, such as hedonics, marketing, artificial intelligence or network regulation. They are not written exclusively for a specific scholarly discipline such as the philosophy or sociology of games (online or otherwise),²⁹ cyberspace law, copyright, media law or legal studies per se. They are not a matter of autoethnography, in other words, an account by an anthropologist or sociologist of that person’s experience as a participant in a global virtual space.³⁰ Instead, they explore different aspects of a cultural phenomenon, bringing together insights and pointers to scholarly literature outside the book with which readers in one discipline may be familiar but readers in other disciplines regard as novel.³¹

That multifaceted approach is founded on a legal analysis, centred on an understanding of social interaction as a matter of enforceable rules that are rejected or accepted on an individual and collective basis.³² It is, however, of value for academics, later-year undergraduate students and graduate students in several disciplines (in particular, cultural studies, sociology, media/communications and marketing), alongside policymakers, virtual world developers and consumers.

One rationale for the book is to provide consumers, the contemporary version of Virginia Woolf’s ‘common reader’, with opportunities for understanding a space that has their attention and – as the following chapters illustrate – their loyalty. It is thus a matter of enabling users of Animal Crossing to be Woolf’s ‘fellow-worker and accomplice’ in making and understanding their own narratives alongside the narratives of their peers,³³ a co-authorship or co-crafting³⁴ that is more akin to fan fiction³⁵ than to Roland Barthes’ notion that reading is a matter of re-authoring.³⁶

Digital World Making

This book began by referring to Animal Crossing as a virtual world. It ends with comments about large-scale simulations based on artificial intelligence, in other words, a use of global-scale digital technologies (in particular ‘virtual reality’) under corporate auspices to enable greater interaction with – and the likelihood of under-recognised exploitation by – marketers and government entities. One starting point is to ask what is a virtual world, something that can be answered briefly here and explored in more detail in later chapters.

The 2010 Preserving Virtual Worlds report on archiving referred to characterisation of a virtual world as ‘an interactive simulated environment accessed by multiple users through an online interface’.

That report suggested that such environments have six essential features:

shared space (multiple users), a graphical user interface, immediacy (‘interaction takes place in real time’), interactivity (‘the world allows users to alter, develop, build, or submit customized content’), persistence (‘the world’s existence continues regardless of whether individual users are logged in’), and socialization, or a sense of community.³⁷

Animal Crossing is a virtual world in the sense that it offers a stylised online simulation of social interaction between users (each of whom is represented by an avatar)³⁸ and database-generated characters in the physical world, alongside simulation of time (in particular seasons) and changes to environments. That simulation, for example, involves ‘curation’ by individual participants in the virtual world – often referred to in scholarly and popular literature as players, actors or users – of ‘islands’. Curation is a matter of collecting, display and maintenance. On an Animal Crossing player’s island, it is analogous to an individual’s agency – choices and actions – regarding what plants they might select for a private garden and tend in that garden or what artefacts such as their children’s drawings and fan memorabilia they might preserve and display in that person’s home.

Those islands are digital representations of a physical space that can be enhanced through the user’s decisions about landscape architecture, buildings and interior decoration. The islands in that archipelago are visited by platform-generated characters (generated by Nintendo software and specific to the virtual world). The avatars of other users also visit the player’s island and, like the platform-generated characters, interact with the player’s own avatar.

The virtual world encompasses seasons, with a virtual winter manifested by the online depiction of snow and bare trees that in a later season will feature leaves, blossoms and fruit. It also encompasses a depiction of night and day that reflects time in the physical location where the user of the world is located. If you are using Animal Crossing in Australia, for example, you experience the same seasons and night/day online as in the real world. The online world experienced in Australia is not sunny and dry 24/7 and is not an embodiment of the seasons in the northern hemisphere.

The simulation also encompasses an economy specific to the game, with rewards for investment in virtual artefacts and fluctuations in the price of virtual commodities. Just as in economies outside Animal Crossing, those fluctuations are outside the control of individual users. The economy thus resembles the economies (trades, taxes, speculations, investments, forecasts) that take place in the physical world but is an aspect (indeed enabler) of entertainment. It is thus distinct in nature,