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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 June 2025
One enthusiast reviewed the latest iteration of Animal Crossing with the comment that:
New Horizons feels like a near-perfect distillation of everything the franchise has to offer. The culmination of two decades’ worth of promise and refinement.
It's cozy. It's creatively empowering. It's high-stakes. It's impossibly laid back. It serves up an effortlessly accommodating experience that allows players to set their own goals – whether that's remodeling their island from top to bottom, dipping their toes into the fraught turnip market, spending an evening designing ludicrous garments, or maybe just dropping by for a few hours to catch some fish.
In New Horizons creativity is its own reward, but it's also a shared experience. …. It's rare to see a community as warm, welcoming, and genuinely supportive as the one that's gathered around New Horizons, and honestly, that's one of my favorite things about it. Sometimes it can feel like kindness is in short supply on the internet, but Animal Crossing has become a shining example of how video games can be a massive force for good.
Most computer games, just like much movie-going and past practice regarding reading with (and to) family members and friends, are social. Many online combat games involve groups of friends or colleagues taking on the avatars of other people, sometimes physical located in other countries and continents but interacting in a shared virtual space, alongside foes generated by the game software. Although worlds such as New Horizons, GTA and DOTA are virtual, they are an artefact of data centres (aka server farms) located in multiple jurisdictions and thus tied to the legal ‘realspace’ highlighted in Chapter 7. As noted above, that gaming in cyberspace is sometimes exhibited to the world at large through, for example, services such as Twitch.
Animal Crossing offers different facets of ‘social’: a more welcoming, slower and gentler sociability in which friendly interaction with the villagers and with other players is strongly valorised. It is not viscerally tribal, a matter of us versus them or winners and losers. It involves respectful interaction with the villagers (and more broadly with the environment within the virtual world, a matter of social norms reinforced through technical constraints).
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