How Animal Crossing Changed My Life

One trait of an autistic person is that they can be obsessed with one subject for a long time. When talking to others about their obsession, they can go on and on about it, oblivious to their surroundings, time and subject's boredom. When this trait is used appropriately, it can lead to great development. In this blog, I'm hoping to use this to an advantage, talking about my favorite past time: Video games. How they've affected my life, how do they shape my autism and what viewpoints I may have thought of that a normal person may not consider before.

For my first entry, I thought to start off with a series that kick-started my journey to developing myself: Animal Crossing. Particularly the original version on the Nintendo GameCube and Wild World from the Nintendo DS.    

I first heard of this game from reading Nintendo video game magazines such as Cube. But it would take a long time before it would be released into the UK, presumably due to the huge amount of translation work. It was actually my twin brother (also autistic) who bought the game while I watched him. We hadn't experienced a game like this before which uses real time to create events and change the town's appearance. For example, in winter, it would actually be snowing and the villagers would be celebrating Christmas (referred to as Toy Day) and you can buy Christmas trees. It helped that my brother is a big fan of animals so he connected with this game easily. Each day after school, he would set aside a couple hours to check on his virtual town. As a spectator, I too couldn't help but feel immersed watching how the villagers develop, sharing the laughs with the witty dialogue as well as sharing the pain when a favorite villager moves away.

Many months later on a cold rainy school day, my brother and I were browsing on the school computers to see if we can find pictures of the Animal Crossing villagers. What we found instead was a website called Animal Crossing Community where players from all around the world can chat with each other and even trade items. My brother would soon create his own account and started to chat amongst fellow Animal Crossing fans. As with the game itself, we've never experienced anything like this site before. It was surprising on how easy it was to chat to strangers compared to real life. With talking online, we have time to think about our words and not be afraid to share our thoughts. In real life, our words would often jumble around themselves with our true feelings getting lost in the process, or sometimes forgetting what we want to say until it's all over.

Much like with the game, I would often be curious about what my brother gets upto in Animal Crossing Community and would sometimes borrow his account. It was only a matter of time before I decided to get into the action myself with my own account and my own Animal Crossing game which was the DS version called Wild World.

Animal Crossing Wild World improves on the original in nearly every way. While some of the holidays were lost, the portability means you can play anywhere, fitting for the game's nature. Like my brother, I soon developed my own routine for the game: After school, I would boot up the game, check on all my villagers, the shops and write some letters. When all that's finished I would make my character wait outside my house and keep the game running while I would be doing my own stuff (such as browsing on the Internet). After around 30 minutes, I would return to the game and try to get the villager's attention to talk to me.

There's a reason behind this waiting around business and that was for a trick I discovered. If you make a villager run up to you, there's a chance that the villager will give you a picture of them as a memento. Take my favorite villager Bob for example (who is not only my favorite villager but he was the one who gave me his picture first).  

These pictures can be placed in your house and when interacted with, you can see their birthday and favorite quote (Bob's was "I'm a cat. Chillin' is in my blood, man!"). Each villager has one and I made it a mission to collect each and every one of them (excluding the DLC Monkey villagers) which I succeed after playing for over two years. While I admit this trick seems primitive by today's standards, it allowed me to have more control over the game which made me feel more comfortable and secure with setting my routine. The 3DS sequel named New Leaf made it harder to obtain pictures so I didn't stick around with that game as much as I hoped to.

Now you may think that collecting all 156 pictures sounds like a tall order but I managed to keep track of them by keeping a notepad and a printed list of villagers that I found on the Internet. When I have a goal, I am able to keep focused on it, able to organize myself by any means necessary (usually visually as visual learning is a strength of mine) and not let anything sidetrack me. I guess an autistic person would find this easier than a none autistic person due to them finding it easy to focus on one interest at a time, ignoring anything that doesn't relate to the interest.

While this trait can help the person develop their interest and connect with others, it's important that they don't entirely focus on only that obsession as it could alienate people who are not interested which can make it harder to develop new friendships. By knowing different people and having different interests, they can develop themselves to have an interesting life. Variety is the spice of life after all. When I mention my interest to a friend who may not know much about it, I try to keep it brief and simple so that they can understand what I'm saying.

Even after I retired from Animal Crossing Wild World, I would continue to check on Animal Crossing Community, developing friendships which would eventually grow beyond the website but that's a story for another time...