Animal Crossing is literally the only game I know of built around the concept of real-world-time delayed gratification, and literally forcing you with gameplay to slow down and just, like, anticipate tomorrow, appreciate the small gains you can make today, watch your progress build over time.
Like in any other game I can just keep playing to make things happen faster, or with mobile/fb games you can pay money to make things happen faster. But in Animal Crossing?
That one of the appeals of video games is instant gratification is a gimme. That you do something and it rewards you right away, that simplicity and accessibility of a sense of accomplishment that would take hours or days to achieve through normal daily tasks. It’s a dopamine rush. People talk a lot about how games can be addicting. I know I can get depressed and instead of addressing the problem, just play a game. Where I don’t feel so useless, and I get that dopamine hit. And I don’t want to leave the game and face the slow grinding process of a long arduous task in my real life, think about having to push through when the award is ages away.
But Animal Crossing is literally like “sorry, come back tomorrow”. You can actually run out of meaningful things to do in a day. You can start a project in Animal Crossing and take real-world months or years on it, and if you’re sticking to intended gameplay, there’ll be nothing you can do sometimes to make completion happen faster. Sorry, gotta wait for that tree to grow. Sorry, check back tomorrow when the store has restocked. Sorry, that item is seasonal, gotta wait until spring.
I like a lot of video games, and so I don’t want anyone to take this as a “video games are bad!” thing. Because they are not. And goodness knows they aren’t the only hyper-fixated hiding place I’ve distracted myself with instead of getting my shit together. But it is true that something about the gameplay of other games can be something of a trap for me when I’m in a bad place. Making success seem like it’s just one step away if I keep playing. Making it feel like I could be doing so much more in the game than I can do in my life.
Animal Crossing, in the meanwhile, genuinely helps me remember to think long term about goals, to have faith that my efforts today will have long term effects, to remember the benefit of tiny daily maintenance to keep things how I like. And it’s the only game that I can set down after a short play session feeling “done”, and not like I need to quick jump back in at the next opportunity and keep grinding because I’m So Close to whatever it is.
I don’t know if I’d go as far to say most video games are bad for my mental health. In fact, I definitely wouldn’t. I love video games, and they don’t cause my downswings at all. My mental health gets bad on its own, and sometimes my video game habits can be a red flag for me to watch out for. Not a cause, but certainly a symptom, and a bad coping mechanism. But Animal Crossing is the only game that is consistently good for my mental health. When I’m actively playing Animal Crossing with goals in mind, it changes my entire mental state with regard to my whole life. Animal Crossing forces a patient, optimistic outlook on me literally by design. Whereas I come out of any other game in a sort of frenzied state of feeling like I should just be able to do everything now, and why is life so slow and hard? I come out of Animal Crossing with a mentality of “every lit bit helps” and “all in good time” and “let’s do what we can today, and there’ll be more we can do tomorrow”. Because that’s literally how the game is designed.
It’s not just a good game in the sense that it is well made and fun to play. It is a good game in the sense that it is actually beneficial to myself and others.
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