I will be the first to admit that Animal Crossing: New Horizons (ACNH) has been a welcome distraction for me throughout the past year. At the beginning of this term I saw Mel’s post about Animal Crossing as a Mobile Cultural phenomenon and I began thinking a bit more critically about the game when I played it in my downtime.
Recently I started thinking about its viability as an educational tool for ecology since the game allows you to catch various fish, insect, and sea creatures, provides a related pun whenever you catch them, and offers quick facts about these organisms when you donate them to Blathers at the museum. I decided to do a little bit of research about ACNH, and found this article about the economic lessons it teaches players.
The 10 economic lessons include:
- Trading creates value
- Rare Items: Price is a function of supply and demand
- The Turnip Market: Arbitrage
- Nook’s Cranny: Elasticity
- Borrowing from Tom Nook: Monopoly and the Marketfor Loanable Funds
- The Museum Is a Pure Public Good
- Cousin Redd: Asymmetric Information
- Designing Your Own Island: Budget Constraints
- Planting Trees: Property Rights and Incentives for Preservation
- Triple Bottom Line: Profit Maximization
The authors also included sample lessons for those of you interested in learning how you could incorporate ACNH into your classroom.
Though not related to ecology I still thought it was interesting and something I hadn’t yet considered. I could imagine that using ACNH for an ecology lesson would require further access to the Internet in order to conduct self-led research based on the animals you caught within the game. For example, in the game there is a rare fish, called a coelacanth that can only be caught when fishing in the sea while it is raining. How accurate is this method of capturing them to how you would find them in the wild? Requiring students to then conduct their own brief research using mobile technology could help them gain a better understanding of the real world– including portions of it they might never otherwise have access to, like the deep ocean. Case and point– a brief search into coelacanths reveals that they are deep water fish living off the coasts of Africa.
For those of you who have played ACNH, are there any other fields of education in which you could see this game having educational value?
I’ve been obsessed with AMCH since it came out and the only educational value that occurred to me before reading this post was the museum system where kids (and even adults) can learn about the wonderful wildlife, which may inspire them to conduct research on these animals and insects in the real natural environment and critically think about to what extent the game has captured these animal behaviours and their habitats. Your post has led me to consider other educational possibilities other than zoology and ecology. Art education is one of them since players are allowed to customize tiles, items of clothing, and interior/garden design using the ‘design’ feature. Of course, there are other games and applications that would have better art design features, but sharing your design with a number code and show off your unique island can be a huge motivation among youngsters. The downside of using this game as an educational tool is that the game itself and the game console are not cheap unless the educator is just showing the game and allow students to try and play in class. However, it opens up my mind and made me to consider how commercial games can serve educational functions in schools.
Yes, I think it is educational. I gave this very question some thought not so long ago. It happens to contain ludic elements, but learning, critical thinking, and collaboration are demonstrated. And if you’d like to consider a minimally academic approach to the answer:
Huizinga relates play to culture and restricts the “higher forms of play” to its social manifestations. Characteristics of play are divided in to play in general and social play in particular in quite a long list. Some examples include: It is a voluntary action | It is superfluous | Can be deferred or suspended at any time | It is never imposed by a physical necessity or moral duty | It is never a task | It is done at leisure | It is free | Spatial separation from ordinary life, marked our materially or ideally | Play plays itself out to the end | It has an element of tension or uncertainty and solution | All play has rules: spoilsports and cheats threaten a game | It is an uncertain activity without a determined | Communities of permanent social groupings are created.
Caillois similarly believes that games are: Free/voluntary | Separated from ordinary life and boundaries | Uncertain/not determined beforehand | Unproductive/creates no goods or wealth | Governed by rules/suspension or ordinary laws | Make-believe/awareness of a second life. Games are further divided into Fundamental Categories: Agon (competitive games) | Alea (games that are based on decisions independent of the player) | Mimicry (temporary acceptance of illusion or imaginary universe) | Ilinx (games based on the pursuit of vertigo, e.g. spinning)
In seriousness, after all ECONOMICS is a Serous Game (look up Sylvester Arnab if you’re truly interested in Serious Games, or Deborah Fels’ economics courses with XP ‘experience points’ for marks at Ryerson University). let’s see if we can map some of these theoretical foundations from Huizinga and Callois to Animal Crossing: New Horizons:
The destination is a peaceful island. The player is presented with a tent and immediately learns that cooperation can be fun as she works together with her new neighbours to find a great spot to live. The player makes tools and builds furniture by hand, learning important skills along the way. Players collect food and work to create materials, for example use an axe to chop a tree to create lumber to build a house. Where there are no tools yet to help with work, there are ways to bend conventional rules. Players can fill in holes by kicking dirt into them instead of using a shovel or leap over the holes to avoid them. When the player pushes their luck and tries too hard to get things in trees that are currently out of reach, maybe some apples, they may get a visit from bees or wasps and may need to find some first aid. Hard work leads to the acquisition of enough materials to build a house that replaces the tent. Eventually, cooperation leads to community growth and the option for an assigned leader, whose role can be shared. More work leads to more facilities and more detail in the game environment. Of Caillois’ four main categories of play, Animal Crossing: New Horizon fits nicely into the Mimicry category because the player is immediately thrust into an island paradise full of plenty of food and resources that merely need some hard work to obtain. The game is separated from ordinary life and boundaries in the sense that children are not normally dumped on an island populated by animal strangers that may be willing to help them find shelter and food if you help them in return. This make-believe awareness of a second life is governed by rules, but the player is free to choose which rules to apply in each scenario. What’s nice about not falling into the Agon category, is that collaboration rather than competition supports positive outcomes not only for the player but for the entire community. Caillois clearly thought that Huizinga’s premises were unfounded, but agreed that the results of his work generated some good categories for thinking about games. Following Huizinga’s conceptualizations of games, Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a superfluous game. It is completely unnecessary, can be started and stopped and deferred or suspended at any time. It contains tasks that the player will want to complete, but it is never a task itself. It is done at leisure. The social dimension of play, a game’s highest form according to Huizinga, is important here. Communities of social groupings are created with continued cooperation, the sharing of labour, of goods, and services.
Huizinga, J. Nature and Significance of Play as a Cultural Phenomenon. In K. Salen and E. Zimmerman (Eds.) The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology (pp. 96-120). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Caillois, R. The Definition of Play and the Classification of Games. In K. Salen and E. Zimmerman (Eds.) The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology (pp. 122-155). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Hi Dana,
I can’t believe there is a scholarly paper on Animal Crossing. Game worlds have such complex economy systems that it makes sense to use them for educational purposes. MMORPGs nowadays have multiple game currencies and their own markets with demand set by the players. We can build simulations to teach students economics, or we can find an existing one for students to enjoy. Game companies make much better systems than educational companies in my opinion. Better yet, as in serious play, have students design the economics, or in your case, design the ecosystem in their own game worlds. Game making is often more educational than game playing. I feel like that because it takes a very long time to get settled in a game world, playing these complex games would have to be done outside of class and would need to stretch over an entire course. Perhaps at the very beginning, we can ask students to play a game and set learning milestones every month. It could be a long term project.
Ying,
That is a great point! I agree that game making is often more education as it requires a deeper understanding of the topics in order to effectively design a game around them, and it also takes a lot of time and consideration to determine a fun way to share the information without overwhelming people who are new to the topic. I also feel that if games better engage students then it doesn’t necessarily matter if it takes students a longer amount of time to learn the same amount of information– what matters is how much they learn, absorb, and incorporate into their own life. After all, life is just a game we can’t escape, right? Obviously there are limitations to this given that there needs to be some standard time frame, desired learning outcomes, etc. But I very much like your idea of having students choose a game to base a long term project on and having those monthly learning milestones to assess progress.
Honestly I find Animal Crossing so fun and engaging that I lose track of how much time I spend on it. I would love if a class required me to play it!
Are there any games that you enjoy playing that you could envision being using in an educational context?
Most of the games I played long term, I can only see them being used to study economics. I played a lot of MMORPGs when I was in high school and all of them had their own markets. Items would fluctuate in value every time there was an update. My husband plays FF14 and it is COMPLEX!
Silly me thought you were talking about actual animals and actual crossings, as this Parks Canada live cam demonstrates…
https://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://parks.canada.ca/nature/science/controle-monitoring/cameras&ved=2ahUKEwiy9JCu1MWGAxUnEDQIHWxwCIEQFnoECB0QAQ&usg=AOvVaw25MWpZHSjqE80dMHdPLDpX
Highly educational in place-based learning and animal locationsl awareness