Game rules vs. fandom. How Nintendo’s Animal Crossing fan-made content negotiates the videogame meanings.

This article analyses LGBTIQA+ playing experiences of Animal Crossing New Horizons (ACNH). It first surveys LGBTIQA+ players of ACNH, with questions regarding ways of playing, identity, community, and fanfiction practices. It also analyses LGBTIQA+ ACNH YouTube videos, divided into three main categories: design, gaming, and fanfiction. The first category, design, is analyzed quantitatively. The second and third categories follow a qualitative analysis, grouping findings into seven subcategories: (a) decorating, (b) celebrating Pride, (c) counter-gaming, (d) weddings, (e) coming out, (f) self-determination and encouraging discourses, and (g) community building. Explorative results show that, although out-game LGBTIQA+ experiences are necessary for queer self-realization, the in-game experiences of our sample help non-cis-straight identities and communities. They also demonstrate that diversity and intersectionality are fundamental in the ACNH queer community sampled, and that LGBTIQA+ players perform queer counter-gaming: transforming the game's tools and affordances to encourage self-expression.

show abstract

Coconuts, Custom-Play & COVID-19: Social Isolation, Serious Leisure and Personas in Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Comerford

2021

Pers Stud

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper discusses Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ (ACNH) release during the COVID-19 pandemic, and draws upon responses from nearly 2000 players to frame how the game acts as a platform for routine substitution and social connectivity in a disconnected physical world. A combination of the game’s elements, including its comforting aesthetic, participatory community, financial mechanics, and goal-setting, promotes the player’s construction of their sense of self and provides crucial stability. In contrast to other life simulator games such as The Sims, the timing of ACNH’s release makes its substitution efforts more adoptable by a wide spectrum of players between casual and hardcore sensibilities. Moreover, the game substitutes some complex face-to-face interactions during self-isolation and it affords stability and routine through a simulacrum of real-life, however exaggerated and narrowed in scope. The gameplay provides player agency and self-determination of playstyle as well as routines that contrast with the intense disruption of the everyday by the pandemic. Players’ shared affinities and engagement with the game function as a form of serious leisure which in turn creates personas from a diverse range of roles such as, the social player, the turnip trader, the gardener, the artisan. The persona roles enable players to adopt multiple recognisable specialisations within an expansive social environment. In essence, players of ACNH create an array of malleable, interchangeable gaming personas that successfully embody the routine and social play forcibly absent from real life during the pandemic.

show abstract

Game rules vs. fandom. How Nintendo’s Animal Crossing fan-made content negotiates the videogame meanings.

Abstract: Game rules vs. fandom. How Nintendo's Animal Crossing fan-made content negotiates the videogame meanings Las reglas del juego vs. el fandom. Cómo el contenido hecho por fans de Nintendo Animal Crossing negocia los significados del videojuego

Cited by 3 publications

References 14 publications

Equity and Embeddedness: A Dominant Theme for Contemporary Gaming Research

Equity and Embeddedness: A Dominant Theme for Contemporary Gaming Research

“Video Games Were My First Safe Space”: Queer Gaming in the Animal Crossing New Horizons LGBTIQA+ Community

Coconuts, Custom-Play & COVID-19: Social Isolation, Serious Leisure and Personas in Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About