Why crossing Animal Crossing makes you calm down,

People like to complain about gaming, until they decide they like gaming. Or at least, at certain games.

Crossing the Animals: New Horizons it is another very successful game of the year, after a few days of release, and it's a game focused solely on grinding. You might argue that the Pokémon series – one of the greatest philosophies in gaming history – is also focused on digestion.

With just a few simple designs, the task after collecting hundreds or thousands of items in weeks and months becomes a task of monitoring, guessing, and agency that many players find humiliating rather than annoying.

I like it when we can stop referring to the work people put into this "grind" game, and start calling it a little more: "a little bit further." Games that show gentle progression give us a sense of progress and reach, teaching us that putting in a little work consistently while taking things one step at a time can give us great results. It's a lesson in good health, and as a way to calm yourself and others, and it's all achieved by building a game.

But how do designers work and get into not only fun experiences, but to help ease anxiety? What boundaries ensure that we find joy and comfort in these repetitive actions, instead of being offended by the grind?

Crossing the Animals: New Horizons& # 39; Release and success are a good reason to get into the art of being slow, so let's break down what makes this type of design so successful.

Animal Crossing and the power of slow development

Crossing the Animals: New Horizons you couldn't get out at a better time, as so many of us are getting in for a coronavirus shutdown, and need some kind of relief or escape from stress. The game is undeniably the largest stage of gentle development in the market in terms of setting, theme, goal setting, and content collection.

Each of these areas of game design are important – and important for gentle progression games – but I think the best place to start is in the area.

Placement

The most important aspect of any gentle game – to further its success. Or perhaps more accurately, I should say: lack of standing.

Removing strong time pressure from tasks, demands, collections, or other programs is essential to making the game work for the people. Fun progressive games allow you to play whenever you want, and most importantly, that and go whenever you want. Being able to play at your own pace, while feeling like you're in control of the experience, is important. Mild development stops being gentle when games start to put pressure on you, or make you do certain things faster.

In Animal Crossing: New Horizons, you can easily interact with the game for 10 minutes at a time, or you can play for three hours straight. No correct answer. Supporting player-time management decisions, and allowing short- and long-term activities, is a great way to respect personal time and make them more comfortable with the game.

The whole world sets a time limit, a deadline, and pressure. A game that is focused on moving forward gracefully is not, or at least should be, rarely. It sounds easy, but the players that inspire them without rushing them are anything but.

New Horizons It arguably answers the question of understanding of the opposite, in fact. It usually slows you down deliberately, showing that you don't have to do everything at once. Acknowledge that island life cannot, and should not, be rushed. Because its clock is synchronized with real-world time, and its progress is monitored after actions you can only do a certain amount every day, you are forced to slow down and smell the flowers. You cannot rush to the next job, because the next job is usually available until tomorrow. Without the ability to be more advanced, leave time to get involved with collecting items, decorating your island, and making friends with locals.

Think of it as just working: You don't build muscle or lose weight by working six hours, one day a week. You should dedicate an hour each day for six days if you want to see and hear the results. Meditation works the same way: You will only see results by doing a moderate amount of daily practice, consistently.

This is a lesson that can be overlooked in game development, and in life in general now. We tend to be so overworked and over-pressured – with so much focus on endless production – that being told you can do great things by sticking with something with a long pull, or something you do for a few minutes a day, is a refreshing message.

A small design feature in Animal Crossing turned many players into hoarders

This kind of design may be a fire, though, and we already see it happen because some people play the game during confinement, turning many players into hypocrites by accident.

This has to do with the direction of the museum.

In New Horizons, the island you are developing is designed to open a museum early on, driven by the character Blopes. The museum in this game is an opportunity to collect and show off fossils, fish and bugs.

It takes at least two days before the museum opens, from which guests are invited to the island. At first, when he opens with Tom Nook, it takes a day for him to get to the island. When he arrived, he received 15 species of fish and insects before getting ready to begin construction of the museum, which took another day to complete.

However, even if players only need 15 toys to get started, the tasks that come with endless resources on your island are fish and bugs that can be caught. Wood, minerals and fossils appear daily.

Boots and fish are the only resources that players can collect endlessly during the time it takes for the museum to open. In many cases, the players have finished collecting a large collection of different artifacts to the museum, collecting them in and out of their tents while waiting for the Blies to open after two actual days. If you give people the opportunity to digest, it turns out, they will.

Sadly, this story brings me to my next point with a little more progress, which has to do with how these games shape the player's intentions.

What you need to do, and how you need to do it

Mild progression works out important absence set goals for the player, while allowing them to choose which goals they want to work on, and at what speed.

Want to fish until your arms fall off? Yes, go ahead! Want to make 200 cakes of cake? No problem! Want to talk to your villager friends all day? You can!

Crossing the Animal offers many soft purposes, but it won't dictate when you need to work on them, or when they should be completed. If you want to take a year off then join the museum and would like to fill every inch of your island with fish tanks? Do it. The game can set goals, but it all comes down to you and when it comes together, there is plenty to do when deciding on a break for any of your projects.

Compare that method with that of an intermediate action game, which almost completely blocks your progress until you reach the current goal the game has set for you. Crossing the Animal always ensures that when it asks you to do it this is, you always have many ways to do it that if instead you are not following the promotion of the game.

Demonstrate maturity and goal setting ACNH specifically that the game will reward you and celebrate your progress whether it is done quickly or for a long time. Citizens will always praise you for the things you do and the projects you complete, and there are all kinds of celebrations when you complete your goals. No one ever wonders why it took so long.

The game lives up to its own achievement plan tied to its economy, which seems to go against the idea of ​​moving forward gracefully, except that it doesn't seem to bother with some degree of productivity. There is a debt to pay, but Tom Nook won't kill you for interest.

The player can care about their progress through the game, though, and that brings me to my next point.

Knowing your act is important

There is always plenty of content to collect in mild progress games, and additional content is often added with updates to keep players interested in today's games.

Getting things consistently involved is one of the signing of these games, and endless rewards are a great way to keep a player's desire. And if you want the best things in the game, all you have to do is spend time playing, or do the work you have to do to get that thing.

That level of prediction is often what makes these games effective – and under pressure – is mental exercise. There is a lot to accomplish, but there is no rush, and you almost always know exactly what you need to do to move forward. It is important that the rewards of your actions are visible, and the path to your destination is specified. The power of scheduling your sessions to keep chasing your personal goals leads to a sense of calm and control that many players feel when playing these games.

What other formulation challenge does anyone working in a game focusing on gentle progression need to overcome: How do you show the player that what they do matters?

It reveals progress

If you've ever done any workout or tried to plan a specific part of your life, you'll know that there is a balance between seeing the full goal picture and taking enough steps that the process doesn't make you overdo it. Great games to promote the best stages of managing this balance by giving you a sense of the possibilities of your development – while also showing you what to expect from your time and game – without overshadowing the process.

Crossing the Animals: New HorizonsThe execution plan is deliberately designed to reflect additions, and not to reveal the ultimate goals of those achievements. You will feel the next step to take – for example, the next success of catching fish lies in 50 fish – so you know what you need to do to move forward and feel better. But the ultimate goal? Even if it's something that will take a significant amount of time, you know that taking the next step to get there is always possible.

Photo: Nintendo EPD / Nintendo via Polygon

This means that you can expect to find success in catching more fish over time, but you will not be disappointed with the idea that you may eventually need to catch more fish. And you'll be able to see the progress you've made on that next step in the journey even if you're just in a hurry.

As a bonus, not disclosing all of the feasibility can add a bit of testing to this game that helps people who love test get all the goals without the pressure of knowing what needs to be done. Achievements stop being a map that shows you what to do and where to go, and becomes a reward for the people they want to chase.

This keeps the feeling of the next goal achievable without tempting you to miss the list of tasks, while also making sure you know exactly what you achieved in each lesson. Mild progression only works when you're pointed out, and it feels like you've made some progress, or in a short session.

And this is the key to another popular topic now.

Thinking like a habit

Imagination, if you are not familiar with this period, is a common way of preserving the presence and momentary understanding of the surrounding environment while experiencing a calm and basic feeling.

"Mental health means living in the present and rediscovering yourself in the present, rather than living in the past or looking forward to the future," Psychology Today explains. "Thinking can be a great way to detect and control the latest feelings that are causing problems in personal or professional relationships."

Meditation, coloring, or other relaxation and personal activities are often addressed under the umbrella of thought.

Thinking always comes with an element of purpose – an idea of ​​what you hope to find in the work you put into your careers. Purpose is a powerful motivator for human behavior; you are more likely to do something if you know exactly what you want in the act.

Developers are definitely using this when designing for a gentle progression. Want to find a bigger house? Make a cozy interior? Build a wonderful rose garden to live in with your friends? Here's how you do it!

Goals are often the stories in our minds that we translate into motivation, and ultimately the steps to get where we want to be. What you want to achieve and where you want to go define who you are at that moment in time, and what you can do. Thinking, in many ways, is just a bad side effect of realizing this process in your mind.

One of the most difficult things to invent is to consider translating game systems to patience. Most of the games are entirely focused on the player, with heroic actions moving forward and will spend as much time devoted to playing as possible. Games with mild progress, as controversial as it may sound, often do the opposite, and in so doing will discourage the player.

Telling players that sometimes they can't move forward no matter how much work they put into it is a way to make sure they choose what they decide to focus on, while knowing what they hope to achieve. You can't do it all, so what's important to you that day, or that week?

It's not about sitting down at the same time every day and doing something; it's about knowing when to get up and do something else. It's about knowing why You do something, and what you hope to get out of it to do.

It's a path to rational behavior – a skill that can be useful in many areas of your life – and the fact that this approach is hidden as a relaxation game makes that fact even better.

These design lessons explain why we love these games

Accessibility, thoughtfulness, goals, and predictability – all of these aspects of Crossing the Animals: New Horizons build the attraction of games of progressive grace.

Understanding the investment or the small amount of consistent work and how it can lead you in the long run is an amazing skill and valuable lesson for anyone to learn. The fun games of patient development teach us these skills in a way that actually calms down and makes us feel better.

Players of the developmental game kindly do not want "easy" experiences. It's more accurate to note that games teach us values, or help to reveal values ​​we may not yet understand – and fans of these games want to be mindful and calm.

Anyone who has worked enough to gain muscle mass, or even meditated for a few seconds, knows that achieving any kind of outcome through short stretches of time is a challenge. Keeping quiet and letting your thoughts go is hard work, and if in doubt, spend the next five minutes with your eyes closed, alone with your thoughts. See how tired you are at the end. There is nothing easy about it, but it pays off in many ways in life.

The gentle games of progression are just as challenging, in their own way, as they are Eternal Judgment. And maybe we can learn how to approach each other by understanding why people like different types of challenges, while acknowledging that no one has an easy way to get what they want. Fantasy adventure games often take you to the same place, mentally, just like games like Dark Souls – in a very different way. And the different modes will attract different players.

Just as players enjoy these games on purpose, the designers create them as well. I hope you now have a better understanding of how that happens, and what the small games of progressive gentry allow for between their creators and their fans. There is a reason we turn to these games in times of stress – they are designed that way.

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