In Voltaire's 1759 Candide, the title character after many adventures and tribulations concludes that happiness is a matter of cultivating your garden rather than seeking fortune and glory, an echo of unheeded advice to Roman politician Cicero by his friend Atticus. Candide's erstwhile mentor Dr Pangloss, more generally known for pronouncement that we live in the best of all possible worlds, endorses that sentiment in claiming that ‘when man was put into the garden of Eden, it was with an intent to dress it: and this proves that man was not born to be idle’.

Preceding chapters have suggested that Animal Crossing as a virtual garden and a small virtual world (an archipelago of private islands in cyberspace where there are rules, social interaction, a simulated natural environment and a built environment) rewards those players who in rejecting idleness engage in what might be characterised as cultivation: selection, placement, display, harvesting and enhancement for pleasure or as the basis for greater capability in world making.

The activity of players might instead be characterised as a matter of curation. Critic Jens Hoffmann comments that:

Hoffmann's characterisation offers several perspectives for understanding the game as a source of pleasure and New Horizons as a simulation of an economy: sufficiently real to be engaging but not so real as to generate the inequalities, exploitation, aggression, unhappiness and contestation evident in all real-life economies.

Animal Crossing is a commercial product from a corporation with global scale, intended to provide Nintendo with a superior return on investment, one greater than the returns from savings accounts during periods when Japanese interest (and national growth) rates were very low following the collapse of the property bubble. As preceding paragraphs have suggested, the New Horizons business model is a matter of persuading people to recurrently engage in curation. Buy the game, play the game, pay subscription fees and buy amiibo or other collectables.