All cultural production – whether a matter of manufacturing (artisanal or industrial) or performance – is grounded. It might be attractive to people across the world and across time, whether for innate qualities or because it is recognised as a valued commodity. However, it has a physical and institutional basis: a location within one or more jurisdictions (national and/ or provincial legal systems) with social norms and enforceable rules about activity, irrespective of whether it is perceived as ‘disembodiment’ in a globally networked virtual world. It also has a genealogy – a point of origin, adaptation and reception over time – and may have an aura, perceptions that it is unique or otherwise valuable rather than so omnipresent and so functional as to be unrecognised.

Animal Crossing is a virtual world in which the interaction between live humans and digital characters is online but, like all virtual worlds, the game is tethered to the real world of capital, national/international law and past practice. That world can be considered simply and persuasively as a matter of delight or entertainment, without reference to the scholarship noted in preceding pages of this book. It can however be contextualised by considering its owners – how it came about – and its users and observers, in other words its audiences and critics, theorists or financial analysts who write about it. In understanding Animal Crossing as a large-scale commercial game, an artificial paradise that is a manifestation of corporate decisionmaking rather than a freak of nature, we can start by looking at that world's creator: Nintendo.

That consideration is analogous to exploring paintings, novels, operas and symphonies by looking at the creators (some market oriented, others not; some self-consciously avant-garde, others more conservative), intermediaries and consumers (some of whom, for example, sought visual aids for religious devotion and others, centuries later, engaged in status competition through purchase and gifting to museums or sought to satisfy a deep-seated hunger through amassing objects).

This chapter accordingly considers Animal Crossing as a matter of genealogies and materiality: where the virtual world came from, where does it fit in the spectrum of immersive online games, who are the gamers and why do they play.