How Animal Crossing helped me swim to sobriety

Some things become important to you without permission. 

I remember my first Animal Crossing game because it was an outlier in my preferences. I grew up with a sister who played video games as if they were the only form of entertainment available. Connection was hard for her, so she shared her games with me. I wasn’t thankful at the time, because I was often frustrated that I would have to play video games with her, but no one would play dolls with me. Where my sister liked to play games that had stories you moved with, enemies you needed to conquer, I preferred playing games that gave me the majority of the agency I craved. Living amongst a gaggle of colorful animals that depended on my choices and decisions granted me a freedom that I didn’t know I was looking for. 

I don’t remember the circumstances around receiving my first copy of Animal Crossing: Wild World for the DS, but I do remember that my parents complained quite vocally about how much money it had cost them to get me the secondhand copy. Strained by circumstance, lonely by default, and working through an early adolescence that had been brought on by my duties as a young carer for my disabled sister, Wild World had come to me as an independence simulator. I had control over the majority of the goings on in my town. I chose the town’s name, my villager’s haircut, what my home looked like, and even who lived around me. 

I burned hours upon hours of time playing Animal Crossing. I didn’t read or draw or ride a bike, opting instead to visit my animals. I realize in retrospect that I was having a hyperfixation, but I didn’t have the language at the time to describe how Animal Crossing made me feel. It became a core part of my identity, that Animal Crossing was something I loved. In the same way that my sister found safety and familiarity in her games, I’d found a soft place to land in my tiny town, reclined on my grandad’s sofa with my DS molding my hands into perfect claws as I customized, discovered, excavated fossils and shot balloons from the sky with my slingshot. I remember telling my family that I wanted to pull out of the majority of my extra-curricular activities whilst hunched over my DS, catching some fish or other. I was overwhelmed by feigned responsibility, uninterested in the singing classes that my parents couldn’t really afford to pay for to begin with, the tennis club that I’d never really been excited by.