A Game of Life
How Animal Crossing makes student loans fun
Nintendo’s Animal Crossing is all about juggling debt as it piles on from all directions, and it’s been one of my favorite video games since 2002.
For those of you who don’t actively engage in unrepentantly tedious interactive cartoons, we’re talking about a game in which you furnish an expanding home, befriend stylish neighbors, capture fish and bugs for museum display, pluck weeds, dig dancing fire hydrants out of the ground, design a wardrobe, and much more, all while accruing and paying off exponentially larger loans.
And if you think that sounds fun, know that you’re also the only human in a community filled with anthropomorphic animals that each look like mascots for sports teams named after their species.
In other words, it’s weird.
The first English-language Animal Crossing game came to the United States in September, 2002, when I was 14 years old. Summer vacation was either over or about to be, and sophomore year of high school was just getting started. I read a glossy preview in an issue of Nintendo Power over and over again for months as the release date approached, and that was it for me. I was hooked before I ever played.
The game starts on a train, with a cat called Rover asking a bunch of questions that determine your name, gender, and facial expression. Boy characters have little horns and wear shorts, while girl characters have pointy hats and wear dresses. In the newer games, the world is more gender neutral. Everybody gets a round head and can wear whatever they want.
Things happen pretty quickly after that. You arrive in your village at the beginning of each game with no possessions and no home. Luckily, the friendly shopkeeper, a raccoon named Tom Nook, is always there to provide shelter. Sometimes it’s a one-room home. In the newest game, it’s a tiny tent. This is where the game introduces you to debt.
“There’s the land, the building, taxes, surcharges, various fees, and whatnot…”
The house, it turns out, will cost you thousands of dollars — “bells” in the AC universe. Never fear though, good ol’ Nook is willing to give you a job as a runner for his shop. That’s Nook for you. A raccoon so stingy, he even charges you for “whatnot.”
The job serves as a sort of tutorial. Nook gives you assignments like “Introduce yourself to all the neighbors,” “Write a message on the town bulletin board,” or “Send a letter to a villager.” His low-paying chores introduce players to the basic mechanics of the game before cutting them loose.
From there, it gets a little less linear. Events unfold in real time in Animal Crossing, so if a villager gives you something to sell at Nook’s Cranny after 10 p.m., you’re going to have to wait a few real-life hours for it to reopen in the morning. This gives the game a pace that, when I first started playing, was totally novel to me.
It isn’t a game you really sit down and binge on for hours. Sure, you could fish and catch bugs for as long as you want, but you’re generally able to check the shop’s inventory, talk to each villager, pick all the fruits in town, and attend any holiday events in about a half-hour. Instead of playing for a few hours each day and beating it in a couple of weeks, Animal Crossing is the kind of game you can play for about 20 minutes daily for, like, years.
Back in 2005, when I was 16 years old, I signed a bunch of dotted lines that guaranteed I would be tens of thousands of dollars in debt for decades to follow. I have no recollection of this — or most of my 16th year, if I’m being honest — but I’m reassured on a monthly basis that it must have happened. I did it so I could go to school to be a journalist.
When I got out of college 4 years later, nobody gave me a house. They didn’t even give me a job. So I signed more papers and went to a more expensive school for a year. That all ended in the summer of 2011.
I have no regrets about any of those choices. I had an absolute blast in undergrad, without even coming close to jeopardizing my GPA. Grad school was significantly more serious — that’s where I learned to care about my work — but it was a small, prestigious program that took us on a lot of trips to fancy places where I talked about fancy things with fancy folks while eating fancy foods. I absolutely loved it.
Grad school also gave me the skills I would need to persevere as a freelancer during the 8 months it took to land my first writing job. It gave me the credentials I would need to go back to my undergraduate college as an adjunct lecturer for a semester. My teaching experience and my graduate university’s name got me the job I have now as a TV news producer —a job I landed with no television experience whatsoever— just 4 days after the newspaper I worked for decided to lay off all of its reporters.
But nothing any school ever taught me prepared me to deal with a 5-year accumulation of student loans.
Tom Nook’s home loan was my first experience with monetary debt. It’s small in the beginning, but so is the meager stipend the raccoon offers for running his errands. The fruits that grow native in your town aren’t worth much at the market, and once you pick them, they take days to grow again. The fish and insects that you catch are all going to go into your village museum before you sell any of them, and the ones that are worth the big bucks are rare anyways. That just means it’s going to take real time and some amount of persistence to make enough money to pay off your loan.
The game doesn’t encourage you to pay, either. If you’re happy living in your tiny, one-room house, you can do so for as long as you want. In a chilled-out animal village, though, the loan becomes the most obvious video game objective in sight. Through trial and error, over weeks and months of daily gaming, the delicate balance between the amount of money I could pay Tom Nook and the amount I should pocket in case something cool showed up in one of the stores the next day became clearer. Once I’d chipped away at one loan in steady, even-numbered increments, my house would grow by a significant amount.
For a price.
I don’t have a home loan or a mortgage in real life. I don’t owe any debts to any bipedal raccoons either. I do need to pay, on a monthly basis, for: Rent, Internet, Netflix, cell service, car insurance, a parking permit, credit card bills, and of course, student loans. Animal Crossing gave me a head start by training me, during the 6 or so years when I was playing the games without paying any real bills, to gamify a system of making regular payments. People who play AC are conditioned to feel rewarded by it. The player character in the games even does a little happy dance with a jingle whenever a debt is payed. We feel like paying down is worthwhile because the game made it feel good on a daily basis for years.
In the newest version of the game, Animal Crossing: New Leaf, you’re more than a villager. You’re the mayor. You still have to pay for a house, but there’s a whole city north of the village that you also have to worry about. You upgrade shops, plan public works projects, set town ordinances, and much more — and you take on debt for all of it.
Animal Crossing may have grown up a little, but at its heart, it still makes a game out of taking on as many loans as possible and paying them off over long periods of time. It’s lasted 13 years because — whether in spite of or partly because of that premise — it’s an absolute blast.
