Animal Crossing gave me structure in a shapeless year

I broke the floor on myself Animal trafficking: New frontiers Island, three days before the announcement that the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson, would be locked up in the country. I tossed my tent and I was going to give Timmy Nook a pile to help him build the island’s public store.

I enjoy my first Animal trafficking, But I have not yet hit the “get it” point. The menus were slow to navigate and I had no idea what I was going for. Mining too much material from each of my island rocks involves a convoluted process of digging two holes and then hitting back again in several seconds. Picking the fruit is first done by shaking a tree and then picking each part separately. It felt deliberately inefficient.

“From this evening I must give the British people a very simple instruction: you must stay at home,” the Prime Minister said during his visit. Address on March 23rd. “You should not meet friends. If your friends ask you to meet them, you should say ‘No’ and you should not meet family members who do not live in your home. You should not go to the store except for essentials like food and medicine – you should do this as much as you can. ”

Inside the flat, we tried to make the situation better when we had to pause our lives. The evening out was replaced by tickets to the ride and the marathon sessions of the Carcassonne. We turn on the laptop at the same time and watch pictures while playing Zoom Call with friends we haven’t seen in months. We bought elastic bands and sling gymnastic rings on the old pull-up bar for group workouts on the weekends. Every evening, I started Animal trafficking See what awaits me in Hongland.

I needed an early time full of game work.
Image: Nintendo

Animal trafficking A game that played better in short bursts because the series has a unique approach over time. In most games, time revolves around the player. When the game starts and stops it starts to pass. Almost everything happens on your terms. But Animal trafficking It takes place in real time, so if it’s midnight on March 23 in the real world, it’s midnight on March 23 in the game. (Built-in clock on your console “Time travel, ”But for me, it destroys the fun.)

The attitude makes it harder to play indefinitely every day. The rocks on your island stop spitting out objects as you try to mine them, and leave without fruit to pick from your trees. You can constantly do things like bugs and fish hunting, but inevitably, you will come up against a task that needs to be done tomorrow. It’s a bold design that forces you to wait, while other games often motivate you to play an extra hour. Normally, I would have found the mechanic a little frustrating, but in a locking situation, it felt like it had been standing still for weeks, and I needed it. I couldn’t miss the time playing it for hours; Instead, it had to have a grip on any day of the week.

I came to work on my island. I mowed its weeds, moved more villagers, and began collecting scales to expand my island museum. I sold fruit, earned beads (read: money), and spent them building bridges and arches to make it easier to get to the rough terrain of my island. It turned out to be a small hobby, something to check in once a day, a small project built little by little over time.

For the past 12 months I have considered myself incredibly lucky. I was thankfully able to continue working from home, logging into a computer at the end of my bed each day and chatting with colleagues on Slack and conducting interviews through the zoom. Doing my little bit to help out this year was a little more than just staying home as physically as possible. Animal trafficking Doing so is a little more bearable.

Multiplayer helped me feel connected.
Image: Nintendo

It Animal traffickingMultiplayer components that I really needed during the first few months of locking. It felt like the whole world was playing together as Twitter and Reddit filled the screenshots of the islands with people and requests for cooperation. At work, we set up a dedicated slog channel to share our island’s turnip prices. Normally, you can make a small profit by buying and selling turnips on your own island, but you can also make millions if you work as a team with other players, joining another player’s island when any player offers a particularly good price for turnips. Day.

In a year where so much history has been going on continuously, it is strange how time felt like weeks were never ending. Five days work in my bedroom, two days relaxing in my living room. Rinse, repeat. When events that feel like they happened many years ago actually happened last week, people are making fun of the passage of time on the internet. This year, that weird sense of internet time came out in the real world. Without leaving my flat for anything other than a quick shop, it was hard to realize that they are present at global events, how important they are and how life-changing.

As the months went by and the internet interest in the game dwindled, a steady stream of new features and sporting events gave me a reason to visit Hongland. Nintendo has added new characters such as hedgehogs and diving and red, the hacker who occasionally comes to your island to sell “with artwork”. Celebrations like Halloween were marked with game content that relied on playing on the right day to see their content. Between the big events and new feature additions, each month saw the arrival of new bugs and fish, a gentle trick of the collections before they migrated.

Something important to do, but especially this year, it’s important for me to feel like time is really passing. Like many, I did not go on summer vacation this year and I did not attend any Halloween parties. I don’t have morning cycling to enjoy the country summer or to see its trees gradually turn orange in autumn. Instead, testing in Hongland each month gave me little reminders that the seasons are still changing.

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