Eight Views of Animal Crossing

A world of talking animals and haute couture, trade and Japanese tea houses, lovingly tended gardens, seasonal weather and sociability, self-fashioning and construction. A world that offers insights about performance, global audiences, intellectual property, gift giving, contract law and play in virtual environments. A world that affirms creativity and non-violent sociability, in contrast to digital platforms that embody destruction, mayhem, toxic masculinity and a hyper-kinetic ‘kill or be killed’ ethos. A world that has enchanted millions of people across the globe – a validation of the world maker's capability – and has attracted diverse demographics on the basis of personal recommendations rather than extensive advertising. A world that gained scholarly attention as a consequence of uptake by consumers in many parts of the world as a source of comfort and delight during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This book explores that world, the world of Nintendo's Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It offers a transdisciplinary view of a cultural and commercial phenomenon, including a study of law relating to the operation of Animal Crossing and the virtual world's users.

It is written by an Australian academic with an interest in the interaction of commerce, culture, consumption and law. That interaction is on a global and local scale: from billion-dollar sales to the varying experiences of individual players. The transdisciplinary approach means that it is not intended as a textbook for media and game studies scholars or for lawyers concerned with, for example, intellectual property as a focus of global trade disputes and the dynamics of consumer engagement with copyright. Instead, it resembles two of Japan's iconic cultural productions: Hokusai's 1830–1832 Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji and Kurosawa's 1950 Rashomon.

Both Kurosawa and Hokusai offer multiple accounts – different, conflicting and engaging perspectives – of a single landscape or event. They have been emulated by non-Japanese artists, film-makers and authors. The persuasiveness of understanding through different views means that media and communication specialists have come to refer to the ‘Rashomon Effect’ as a shorthand for understanding complexity through a non-linear narrative and conflicting claims regarding truths.

Abstract

The name ‘Italian Theory’ has come to refer to a transformative theoretical-critical turn, after poststructuralism, away from the sovereignty of language and towards the larger semantic horizon of life. The shift has determined a return to/of the conflict between language and the body. This article proposes that Samuel Beckett's play, Not I (1972), feeds such a renewed interest in the body's interference with the governing works of language. The discussion begins by approaching Beckett's text through Émile Benveniste's notions of subjectivity and enunciation, both ambiguously connected and traversed by a dynamic (and visionary) spatial-bodily dimension. Beckett's attunement to Benveniste, in turn, helps relocate the writer in the contemporary debate on the conflict between language and the body. Not I stands out because it is about a physical struggle against speech that suggests Beckett's own search for his own kind of living thought, a thought of ‘movement and vitality’, as he had phrased it in his early essay on predecessors, ‘Dante … Bruno. Vico.. Joyce.’

Keywords: Samuel Beckett; Not I; Émile Benveniste; body; language; Italian Theory

The Scene of Instruction

Not I might be the exemplary Beckett play that Stanley Cavell has in mind in his reflection on the scene of language instruction in Augustine's Confessions. Written in 1972, it holds a special place in the Beckett canon: it is a linguistic play, about the possibility of speech. A spotlit mouth eight feet above the darkened stage speaks across from a compassionate auditor in a hooded djellaba, the traditional garment from North Africa. The ‘breathless, urgent, feverish, rhythmic’ stream of words amplifies the momentous passage from silence to speech. Mouth crosses to her new condition on an April morning, when she initially finds herself ‘in the dark’, able to hear only a ‘buzzing’ resembling a ‘dull roar’ within the skull and see a flickering beam without. Speech comes, trailing along a continuum of sound and light.

Abstract

The Italian painter Gastone Novelli (1925–1968) met Samuel Beckett in Paris in 1960. The encounter was the culmination of Novelli's long-lasting interest in Beckett's work. The two artists established a collaboration that had a significant impact on their works. Novelli realized a series of lithographs designed to accompany L’image (1959), Beckett's pre-publication excerpt from Comment c’est (1961). This partnership (the two met on several occasions, exchanged letters and commented on each other's work) had important consequences on both Beckett's and Novelli's artistic journeys, well beyond the idea (which was never put into print) of L’image as a ‘livre d’artiste’. On the one hand, it entered – and probably changed – the genetic history of Comment c’est. On the other, it reoriented Novelli's idea of painting as language towards the more radical concept of a painting made of – and not accompanied by – words. While retrieving the aural, Joycean quality of Beckett's prose, Novelli established an interesting connection between Beckett's prose, French Nouveau Roman and Italian Neoavanguardia.

Keywords: Letters; images; intermediality; materiality; embodiment

Beckett's relationship with the visual arts, his observations on painting and his collaborative efforts with artists have been widely explored. However, while the less examined role played by Italian art in his work has gained critical attention in recent years, his aesthetic partnership with Gastone Novelli (1925–1968) has yet to be investigated.

The Birth of Novelli's Artistic Vision

Novelli was born in Vienna in 1925, the son of Margherita Mayer von Ketschendorf, a woman belonging to the old Hapsburg nobility, and Ivan Novelli, military attaché at the Italian Embassy in Austria. The family moved to Rome, where Novelli graduated in sociology and political sciences from Sapienza University. His choice of a field of study not directly connected to the visual arts is particularly relevant to Novelli's cultural outlook. He was not a painter by trade, and even when he became one, he kept a sustained interest in political, social and anthropological issues. Another key element in his life is his involvement in the Second World War. When the war broke out, Novelli joined the Resistance. He became a member of a Partisan Brigade operating in Rome. In 1943, he was arrested and tortured by the Nazis.

In the UK, the Chiltern Railways reconstruction project discussed earlier involved adding a bat deterrent lighting system at the Wolvercote Tunnel section of the railway to account for the well-being of resident bats. The lighting installation helped to deter the bats from flying into the tunnel or traveling through the tunnel when a train was approaching. The lighting project thus helped the bats maintain their linear flight paths and specific flyways. Ambient and artificial light can have important and specific impacts not only on bats but also on birds, who may be thrown off course or distracted by different kinds of light. The Chiltern Railways project considered with critical awareness the impact of lighting on resident bats and installed lighting specifically to prevent the bats from entering the Wolvercote Tunnel, where they might otherwise collide with oncoming trains. In that case, the lighting was a helpful deterrent that could help save their lives. In other contexts, however, artificial light pollution can have detrimental effects, especially for species of migrating birds.

In fact, the light emitted from skyscrapers and other buildings in urban environments can be especially hazardous for birds. According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, within the United States, an “estimated 600 million birds are killed every year from collisions with some of the country's largest skyscrapers.” In particular, Chicago, Illinois; Houston, Texas; and Dallas, Texas, are among the most dangerous cities in the U.S. for migrating birds. These cities are “uniquely positioned in the heart of North America's most trafficked aerial corridors.” As Hilty et al. note, there has been “some discussion around aero-corridors […] although air space conservation is still in its infancy and terrestrial stepping-stone nonaerial corridors continue to be the focus of connectivity for most flying species.” Indeed, while this book has focused more on the issue of wildlife corridors in specific terrestrial landscapes, aerial corridors are an emerging area of focus for wildlife connectivity, and light pollution is one of the main disruptors for wildlife that must navigate them. This case considers the issue of light pollution and its impacts on aerial corridors for migrating birds and provides some possible suggestions for addressing this issue, with a focus on citizen education and “Lights Out” campaigns as possible starting points.

We decided to write this book for two reasons: (1) as far as we are able to determine, little has been written about hybrid heroes and (2) our insights emanate directly from the work we have done. The three of us started our collaboration with a stream of presentations at The Art of Management & Organization Conference in Brighton, United Kingdom, in September 2018. Though we had Skyped and emailed many times, we did not meet in person until the beginning of the event. As we shared a meal in an outdoor courtyard at a restaurant on a back street, our intellectual bond transformed instantly into friendship.

Inge Brokerhof (PhD) is an organizational psychologist, writer, trainer, and researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In her research, she explores how stories influence career identity, future work selves and moral development and she has worked at Harvard Business School and the University of Bath. For her company, stories-@-work, she offers workshops, presentations, and university lectures about change rhetoric, storytelling, organizational psychology, and business ethics. She has also published short stories, poems, and songs.

Stephan Sonnenburg (Dr.) is a professor of branding, creativity, and innovation management at ICN Business School Paris-Nancy-Berlin. Before his academic career, he worked at advertising agencies and founded a management consulting firm focusing on the power of narratives in digital transformation. He is fond of saying that there is nothing as practical as a good theory, and that principle informs much of what we are trying to accomplish here.

Greg Stone is, in a sense, the “odd man out” as he is the only non-academic. He's an independent communications consultant and author. He has written two business books, one focusing on the power of the villain in storytelling, as well as a new mystery novel called Dangerous Inspiration, profiling a collection of artists who run the spectrum from virtue to violence.

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.

Heroes and heroines are everywhere. They figure prominently in many modern popular songs performed by David Bowie, Alesso, and Måns Zelmerlöw, who have all released tunes called “heroes,” and in series and movies revolving around superheroes like The Flash, Arrow, Wonder Woman, and Spiderman, who ultimately save the world or even the entire universe. As far back as Gilgamesh, regarded as the earliest surviving work of great literature, the main character is described as “the most glorious amongst heroes! […] the most eminent among men!” (app. 2000 B.C., see Heidel 1949, 8). That complex epic, written in cuneiform, describes the journey of the king of Uruk, who was part god and part human (Abusch 2001). The universal concept of heroism pervades many cultures and time periods, vide the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Bhagavad Gita, and many biblical stories.

The word “hero” can be broadly defined as “a person admired for achievements and noble qualities” (Merriam Webster 2023). The roots are Latin and Greek and point toward demi-gods or superhumans with transcendent capabilities. For millennia, they have inspired and motivated us, as their stories carry “transrational” knowledge about mores and values, spirituality and wisdom, and their journeys teach us to be more empathetic and to consider new perspectives (Allison and Goethals 2014). When we hear, watch, or read a heroic story, we can experience it through the hero's eyes and achieve a psychological state of euphoria, a feeling of invincibility, and a strong motivation to better ourselves (Algoe and Haidt 2009).

Joseph Campbell (1904–1987), one of the most influential and innovative mythographers of the twentieth century, created a model for the quintessential story, which he called the hero's journey (Campbell 2008). The basic motif is a transformation from one state of being to another in search of the source of life energy. Campbell's foundational work was the starting point for interdisciplinary research focusing on heroes, heroism, and heroic leadership (Drysdale et al. 2014; Allison and Goethals 2014), as well as a strong impetus for postheroic research, which views leadership activities as collective rather than individual (Crevani et al. 2007; Ryömä 2020). Until now, however, heroes or heroic acts have been defined and described in a static way on a journey toward sainthood, enlightenment, strength, and so on.

This book proposes to inject some new aspects into the theory of evolution and the development of the human brain. In the interests of honesty, I am neither an evolutionary scientist nor a cognitive scientist, although I will seriously and critically take into consideration their theories. My own training and approach to the study of religion is that of a historian of religion. Nevertheless, when composing this book I used material from the theory of evolution, history, phenomenology, neuroscience, archaeology, and anthropology for a multidisciplinary approach to the subject of the origin of religion.

This book proposes to examine the nature of religion by seeking its origin within the context of the theory of evolution and the development of the human brain. It is argued that religion is the way the mechanism of natural selection in the theory of evolution operates to help humans survive in the context of a dangerous and hostile world. Survival is accomplished when profound experiences like trance cause a rewiring of the brain, giving birth to what later is identified as religious attitudes and ways of behaving. It is possible to speculate that without the development of religion, humans might not have survived to create cultures and civilizations. Therefore, the development of religion makes it possible for early humans to thrive. This evolutionary process involved adaptation to one's environment, creation of social groups, development of the body, and the brain.

There are also other neglected aspects of evolution not discussed by previous theorists. The implications of the embodied nature of human beings are not always stressed by cognitive theorists. What they more specifically tend to neglect is that human bodies are chemical factories. It is numerous chemicals created within the body that contribute to the development of religious experiences. Another neglected aspect of those influenced by the theory of evolution is that early humans exerted a will to power to survive. This so-called will to power is a process of empowerment with the goal of enabling humans to become strong and powerful enough to survive. This will to power is not something metaphysical but is rather part of the dynamic of natural selection.

Aḥmedī's “Tevārīḫ-i Mülūk-i āl-i cOsmān ve Ġazv-i Īşān bā-Küffar” [literally translating, “History of the Kings of the Ottoman Lineage and Their Holy Raid(s) against the Infidels”] is the foundation text for the study of the rise of the Ottoman State. Virtually every scholarly work dealing with the subject refers to his versified account of the early Ottomans. Even though the “Tevārīḫ-i Mülūk-i āl-i cOsmān” encompasses only a limited period of the Ottoman dynastic history, from Ertuġrul to Emir Süleymān, its importance derives from the fact that it is the oldest annalistic account of Ottoman history that has come down to us. Because those earliest Ottomans left no accounts of themselves, Aḥmedī's work became the key source—though almost always without a proper reading of the text—for subsequent theories regarding the social and political structure of the early Ottoman State. One abiding example of its importance is that Aḥmedī's work has been cited in support of contradictory interpretations of the concepts of ġaza and cihad (jihad) that provide the fuel for debate between Western and Turkish Ottomanists. The “Tevārīḫ-i Mülūk-i āl-i cOsmān” serves as the fundamental reference both for thosewho maintain that the political expansion of the Ottomans was the outcome of a “Holy War” against the “infidel,” and for those who consider the conduct of the Ottomans to have been contrary to any religious ideology of Islam.

Paul Wittek argued that “from the first appearance of the Ottomans, the principal factor in this political tradition was the struggle against their Christian neighbors, and this struggle never ceased to be of vital importance to the Ottoman Empire.”

One enthusiast reviewed the latest iteration of Animal Crossing with the comment that:

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).

Within the context of the process of evolution, there are several simultaneous processes occurring, such as the developing of the human brain, the human body, the universe, the earth, and culture. The evolution of the cosmos, representing macrocosmic change, is matched by the microcosmic occurring within the human body and brain. Likewise, there are macrocosmic and microcosmic changes happening at a different level between the body/ brain macrocosmic sphere and the microcosmic genetic level. In short, evolution is more complex because the changes occurring on the macrocosmic and microcosmic levels affect each other's development. This fluctuating scenario suggests a dynamic situation. Such a dynamic situation indicates that the human brain may have functioned differently at its primitive stage of development as Homo sapiens did when faced with a life crisis. When confronted with a traumatic situation, can we trust that our ancestor's brains acted precisely the same as the contemporary brains studied in laboratories by current cognitive science researchers? Might the contemporary brain respond the same way to a crisis as would have a bran of ancient humans? If evolution does not cease for a species, is it not reasonable to anticipate that contemporary brains would also have evolved within the context of new developments in its social, historical, and natural environments? If responses to these questions are positive, don't they compromise the approach of cognitive science to the study of the nature of religion?

With respects to cognitive science and its application to the study of religion and its associated phenomena, should cognitive science go back to its mental drawing board and tinker with its approach? The history of science seems to suggest that a scientist should pause to reconsider her method. It is in the spirit of an eagerness to always be self-critical and to have a willingness to re-examine one's method that I propose to introduce. Without doing harm to and within the spirit of Darwin's position, I propose to introduce the notion of a will to power, which means more precisely a will to empowerment in order to survive and thrive as an individual and member of a society.

Long before there was a universe, before there was human life, before there was a divine being, and before there was religion, there was vast emptiness. Some helium, hydrogen, other nuclei, and electrons arose, interacted, and eventually exploded, setting in motion elemental energy, matter, and space. If matter was stuff with mass, energy and space were spontaneously created by an event called the Big Bang, a primordial occurrence that happened around 13.3 billion years ago followed by an expansion of space. As the universe expanded, the space between the galaxies continued to get larger, although at the current time nearby galaxies demonstrate a slower expansion compared to more distant galaxies. In addition to expansion, electrons combined with protons to form neutral hydrogen atoms, and electrons also combined with the helium nuclei in the universe. The Big Bang also produced equal massive amounts of positive and negative energy. As the universe expanded, it began to cool and developed the four basic forces: gravitational force, strong force, weak force, and electromagnetic force. The continued cooling resulted in the separation of the gravitational force from the others that compressed to form the grand unified theory (GUT). The continued separating and cooling led to the evolution of atoms, quarks, and electrons. These items became mixed with photons and other particles. This entire expanding universe was subject to physical laws that are unchangeable and universal. Moreover, the Big Bang marks the beginning of time. This is not time that can be measured by a clock, but it is rather cosmic time measured in millions of years.

During his professional career, Albert Eisenstein concluded that the universe was static, a mistake that he eventually recognized. Instead of a static universe, the Big Bang resulted in an expansion of the universe. Proof for this expansion has been provided by astronomers who have discovered that the galaxies of the universe are moving further away from each other. There is no plan for this expansion, which means that the universe is characterized by chance and uncertainty. Despite such characteristics, some scientists think that there are signs of intelligent life in the universe.