Thanks to some distinctly Scottish weather over the holidays, my family and I ended up celebrating Hogmanay at home rather than at the party we’d planned to attend. My smallest son’s wee pal and his parents came over for dinner, and when the smaller members of our group started to spiral out of control around 9pm, we threw them a little midnight countdown party in Animal Crossing.
The last time I played Animal Crossing was in the depths of lockdown. Tending my island paradise helped me cope while largely imprisoned in a 2.5 bedroom basement flat with a baby, a toddler and a teenager. (I was far from the only one – the National Videogame Museum compiled an archive of people’s Animal Crossing experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic, and it’s evident that it was a lifeline for many.) Our guests had brought their family Switch, and we set up the kids with their little avatars so they could join the animals’ New Year party.
They spent about 10 minutes gleefully whacking each other with bug nets before gathering with the other inhabitants in the square with a giant countdown clock in the background, the island’s racoon magnate Tom Nook offering party poppers and shiny top-hats. I was visited by a sudden, arresting memory of New Year’s Eve 2021, which I spent on my sofa, alone but also not alone, because I was with my friends in Animal Crossing, watching the same countdown clock tick down. My youngest had just started walking, and was unsteady on his short, chunky legs. Turning away from the screen, I saw him joking with his big brother, thrilled at being up so late. It felt surreal.
Watching my children discover and experience video games has often felt a little surreal. They enrich or even overwrite my earlier memories of the games in question, like playing on New Game+, or a brand-new save file. Around this time last year we all started playing Pokémon together, the Switch remake of the Red and Blue Game Boy versions that I had played to death myself in 1999. Now Pokémon is not just a thing I loved as a kid but a thing I loved through my kids. Super Mario 3D World feels like a totally different game now, with its four-player chaos and sibling spats. The games are transformed by their presence, their reactions, the differences between how they respond and how I do.
Recently, my youngest wanted to try a Zelda game, and the only age-appropriate one we have is the Switch version of Link’s Awakening. I bristled. When he was a baby, my youngest boy was terribly sick in hospital, and I passed the long hours at his side on the ward trying to keep my terror at bay by playing Link’s Awakening, my headphones failing to drown out the urgently beeping machines. He recovered, but my associations with that game remain bleak despite its summery setting and outrageous cuteness. I swallowed my reflexive anxiety and handed the controller to my son as soon as we found Link’s sword buried in the sand of the beach. It was a healing moment, watching him swing it at spiky land-urchins and rock-spitting spitting octopuses and squat, pig-like spearmen, healthy and whole and with an expression of mischievous delight.
Video games were, for my parents, distant and mysterious, and they viewed them with some suspicion (but, importantly, never disdained them). I would invite them in, try to show them the worlds I saw on the other side of the screen, and though they would spectate with interest I would be like a visitor from another country, showing photos of somewhere they’d never been, trying to explain my sense of awe. With my own children, I’m more like a tour guide: I know this territory intimately, and they’re excited for me to lead them through it.
Later, when our tastes diverge, I’ll presumably be the tourist in their games. I’ll feel like I did 10 years ago when my friend’s 12-year-old showed me his Minecraft server, full of collaboratively built automated contraptions. (He’s an engineer now.) For now, though, Animal Crossing has taken hold. I created a family island for my kids to tend, then dug out the old yellow Switch Lite that was home to the island I took refuge on when they were tiny and we were shut off from the world during lockdown. It is a magnificent island, the product of hundreds of hours of gentle toil, but it has been languishing since the pandemic times; I have felt trepidation about returning to that place and all its mixed memories. But my kids are desperate to visit it. They can help me make new ones.
What to play
For decades, programmers and developers have made a long-running joke out of getting Doom to run on unlikely things from calculators and fridges to cash machines, but it’s nonetheless been a while since I saw this ubiquitous 1993 shooter in a new light.
In Doom: The Gallery Experience, you wander the halls of a gallery with a glass of red in hand, taking in pixelated recreations of Renaissance, Greek and Egyptian art, collecting snacks to fill your cheese meter. Its developers describe it as “an art piece designed to parody the wonderfully pretentious world of gallery openings”. It’s brief, but it certainly brightened my first day back at work this grey January.
Available on: You can play it in your browser via itch.io
Estimated playtime: less than 30 minutes
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What to read
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The New York Times published Video Games Can’t Afford to Look This Good, a long and thoughtful interactive look at the many existential questions of how games are made, with ballooning budgets and unnecessarily high-fidelity graphics.
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The conversation about free-to-play and “gatcha” games were once universally vilified. Now there’s often a suggestion that criticism of these business models ignores the reality of most people who play them, people in parts of the world where console games are inaccessibly expensive. Developer Bruno Dias argues that it is disingenuous to shy away from criticising these pay-to-play models: “We should not consider these companies as fulfilling a need so much as exploiting an inequity.”
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Video game researcher and archivist Felipe Pepe believes the US-centric way in which video game history is presented erases the gaming experiences of millions of people in other parts of the world: the histories of home computers, LAN houses, unofficial mods and gaming cafes.
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A scoop from Game File’s Stephen Totilo, who discovered previously confidential numbers in an Activision court filing: the reported development cost for Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War came to $700m, excluding marketing. It is the biggest game budget ever reported.
What to click
Question Block
Today’s question comes from David: “What would your favourite video game character’s favourite game be?”
My favourite video game character (that I didn’t create myself) is Kazuma Kiryu from the Like a Dragon games. He’s spent a lot of time playing old Sega games in the arcades of virtual Tokyo on my watch – but I reckon he would love Animal Crossing. It would appeal to his sense of responsibility and do-gooder tendencies, and it would be an escape from the violence of his real-world lifestyle. I don’t think of him as much of a gamer – the guy was born into a Yakuza family in 1968, when they wouldn’t have had a NES – but I can imagine him solemnly watering flowers and customising furniture, as a break from rearranging bad guys’ faces with his fists.
If you’ve got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – hit reply or email us on pushingbuttons@.com.
