In New Leaf, every villager had some trivia about them that was used for an in-game event - how many siblings they have, what their hobby is and what their current goal is. Many villagers seem to have randomly-chosen goals and hobbies that do not make obvious sense, but Barold was one of the villagers that had an interesting combo - his skill is computing and his goal is being a programmer.

I thought that it was so specific that it would make perfect sense for someone at the dev team to add him as their own self-insert, and it would explain how in both games he lives in something that looks like an office, and he's so lazy that he sleeps in the same place he works!

The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to test my theory - his Japanese name, Nisshi, does not have any obvious connection to bears or eating, so I assumed that it was a nickname of someone working on the dev team. I looked through New Leaf's credits and found that there were 5 people on the team who had "Nishi" in their surnames, with two of them being women.