In concisely characterising the experience of a virtual world, the authors of the detailed Preserving Virtual Worlds report commented that such a world:

Nintendo designer Ketsuya Eguchi explained that ‘our intent was to create kind of a parallel world, a world that's kind of similar to your own but also different’. Animal Crossing New Horizons is a virtual world because it is a sophisticated simulation: one that has time, space, cause, effect and experience.

The nature of ‘experience’ and ‘the world’ has preoccupied philosophers and theologians for at least two millennia. David Chalmers has recently claimed that ‘virtual’ is ‘real’, just as ‘real’ as experience of the physical world (one made of atoms rather than bits). Posthuman theorist Nick Bostrom asked whether we are ‘sims’ in a virtual world. If the answer to that question – better suited to a book on The Matrix – is in the affirmative, you as the reader are a digital construct reading something generated by another construct. Philip K. Dick more succinctly commented ‘Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away’.

This chapter takes an agnostic approach to deep and perhaps irresolvable questions about reality, the existence or otherwise of the world and the extent to which our perceptions are determined by both language and physical phenomena that in a rationalist culture we deem to be verifiable and thus facts. It instead aims to provide readers who are unfamiliar with Animal Crossing with a sense of what is experienced in playing the game.