some type of adult girl

stinkygrandmother:

Millennials “are splurging on travel because they know they’re unlikely to get on the housing ladder,” The Independent writes. And Animal Crossing, rather than tantalizing us with prosaic daydreams of what we cannot have, now seems to be piling on.

In Pocket Camp, you no longer have a home. You no longer have a town. You are mayor of nothing.

Instead, you have a camper and a campsite, and your “friends” are just as transitory. In-game animal or real-world player, the characters in your little outdoor world will cycle through and out of the zones around you every three hours, leaving no trace of being in their wake.

Your relationships with them are purely transactional: I give you a fish, and you give me cotton. Their terms are clearly outlined from the start, and whatever each animal wants will be clearly outlined on travel screens and above their heads when you happen to wander by.

Each transaction you make, if you are lucky, with leave you with a smidge more money in your pocket than you spent to buy the ability to become friends with that character in the first place, by building things they like at your own campsite.

And over time, after days and days of this, you accomplish… nothing. You gain campsite visitors, exactly as one might gain Twitter or Instagram followers, but aside from a camper full of clothes you won’t wear and chairs you don’t sit on, you’re left empty-handed.

Behind you, you leave no home, no property, no monuments or museums or public works. You have not improved the land around you, raised orchards, cultivated new flowers, or discovered a hitherto unseen fish. You have merely checked off boxes and treaded water, as best you can, to get through one day at a time slightly less poor than you were the day before.

For 15 years, Animal Crossing sold us a fantasy experience about capitalism: that we could be the exception, the beneficiary and benefactor; that we would win in the Gilded Age and so would our neighbors. But the days of winning the Carnegie-simulator are long gone.

Now, at long last, by being reduced to its skeletal, mobile, microtransaction-based form, Animal Crossing is teaching us the harshest lesson about the world we have built around us: The vast majority will toil every day, performing the same tasks, and will never, ever win.

(via melowtune)