Playful, Sociable, Cute, Quarantined – Interactions with Kawaii Characters in Animal Crossing: New Horizons During COVID-19

Abstract

The implementation of social isolation policies in response to COVID-19 coincided with Nintendo’s video game Animal Crossing: New Horizons (also known as atsumare dōbutsu no mori) gaining popularity. At this time, the game served as a means of escape and comfort for those experiencing loneliness and anxiety. The kawaii animal characters that occupy the players’ island in this game are designed to elicit social responses from players as a central part of gameplay, through dialogue, animation, and character design. This article contributes to an emerging body of work that considers the social relations formed between kawaii characters and viewers, through a digital ethnography of English-speaking Animal Crossing fan practices on Twitter, Reddit and Instagram. A key appeal of Animal Crossing during COVID-19 lockdowns resided in its kawaii character design, which elicits caring and playful behaviours in players. Through design, the non-player characters shift between functioning as an object upon which players can act, to a simulated subject that encourages social interactions from the player and stimulates the imagination. Through this flexibility of appearing both ‘real’ and ‘unreal’, players could interact with characters according to their needs during social distancing.

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge and thank Jenny Hall and Sally McLaren for their editorial support for this important special issue on COVID-19. I would also like to thank Deborah Lupton, Ash Watson, Clare Southerton and Marianne Clarke for their feedback on this project. This project was supported by a Vitalities Lab scholarship.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ For more information, see for instance Yano (2015) and Dale, Goggin, Leyda, McIntyre & Negra (2017).

² Ethical approval was obtained from UNSW (Ref HC200424). This project was conducted in line with the Association of Internet Researchers Ethical Guidelines (Franke et al., 2020; Markham & Buchanan, 2012).

³ While New Horizons encourages players to enjoy a kawaii version of nature, it does also ‘cutesify’ colonial logics, through the ways in which players ‘settle’ on their island, terraform the land and extract its resources. For more information on this aspect of New Horizons as well as de-colonizing work in game design, see Kanesaka, 2022, Harris, 2022, Cesar, 2020, LaPensée, Laiti & Longboat, 2022, and Loban, 2022.