Gods of the sandbox - Animal crossing : new horizons and the fluidity of virtual environments

Abstract

In a review of Animal Crossing: New Horizons (AC: HN) (2020), Steven Scaife writes that “the game- changing terrain tools” granted to the player in this iteration of the series leaves the game’s island world “blatantly at your mercy,” making the player, in distinction from earlier Animal Crossing games, not “a newcomer to a simulated community,” but “the god of the sandbox”—the virtual world offers no resistance to the player, and can be reshaped at will. This aligns the game with titles like Minecraft or Dragon Quest Builders that let the player loose in landscapes that can be taken apart and reassembled however the player desires. Such examples foreground, in a particularly explicit way, the fact that virtual environments are marked by a fluidifying sway. Unlike the undeniable, material facticity of the actual world, nothing in the virtual domain—not the environment, and not our being within it—needs to take a fixed shape. Everything can change from one minute to the next, choices can be made, unmade and remade, cause need not necessarily link with effect. Everything is fluid and changeable. Such a perspective stands in contrast to most studies of space and placeness in video games, which consider the virtual worlds of videogames as fixed topologies or definite places, marked by distinct forms and patterns of use. In fact, considering virtual worlds as essentially fluid and malleable would mean that—by the measure of philosophers of place like Edward S. Casey—we cannot even conceive of them as ‘places’ at all. When ‘landscape’ becomes a verb, ‘landscape’ as a noun—a definite, fixed milieu which stands before us and challenges us—loses all of its power, and disappears from view. In this chapter, I shall draw on two primary contemporary philosophical sources—Byung-Chul Han’s writing on “atomized time” (2017) and Federico Campagna’s concept of “measure” (2018)—to argue that the infinite malleability of virtual environments like those of Animal Crossing: New Horizons not only makes them virtual ‘non-places,’ but also represents, in miniature, a particular epistemic organizing principle of reality that holds sway in the contemporary sphere. They embody, and bring to life, a perspective according to which, firstly, time is no longer understood as an extended duration within which cause and effect link up, but is fragmented into isolated moments of pure present, and, secondly, the world is similarly ‘cut up’ into discrete units that can be replaced, reorganized and replicated at will.