All My Friends Are Strangers: On ‘Animal Crossing,’ Starting Over, and Adult Friendships

When I started Animal Crossing on the GameCube in 2001, I didn’t know any of the villagers. When I started Animal Crossing: Wild World on the DS in 2005, I didn’t recognize any of the villagers — they were all new to me. In 2008 with City Folk, 2012 with New Leaf, and 2020 with New Horizons, the social credit I’d built up in each previous game dropped to zero. In every generation, I was the new kid on the block. I had to relearn who I was, both in the context of the game and as a person choosing to play another iteration of Animal Crossing.

It’s hardly a groundbreaking idea that socializing is easier when you’re younger. Moving for school or work three times in the last seven years — to LA in 2017, Chicago in 2020, and Atlanta in 2023 — meant starting from square one again and again with stakes much more profound than those involved in entering a new Animal Crossing town. In the virtual realm of Animal Crossing, your potential pals only have so many personality types, which reduces the guesswork regarding what they do and don’t like without removing it entirely. You’ll still need to trial and error your way into their hearts, or really just keep talking to them every day until they warm up. Real people’s personalities, of course, are more varied and nuanced and can’t be gamed out so easily. 

I don’t chafe against the process of getting to know people so much as the fact that I have so many friends in other places, existing support systems and shared memories and inside jokes — yet here I am, in a new city or on a new island, confronted with the need to start it all over again. I’m already besties with Bluebear on the 3DS; why do I have to get to know her again on the Switch?

Beyond the pain of starting over, there’s the fact that real people you mesh with can be hard to find. In Animal Crossing, your buddies just mill about a small, controlled space, idly waiting for you to come make a connection. In the real world, where do I go to find kindred souls? My job? But those are coworkers, with whom I’m forced to spend so much time, and I want a healthy separation between my work and my life. Where else am I supposed to go, though? We’re all adrift in the social world, strangers in strange lands flitting through spaces where we’re expected to mind our own business. This isn’t me being myopic or lamenting the isolated soul of my whole generation – I don’t want to talk to a stranger in the vegetable section of Trader Joe’s any more than anyone else.

When I was younger, befriending new villagers was exciting. My brother and I spent hours in front of the Gamecube. Our parents were befuddled: my mom couldn’t believe the game could remember our birthdays, and my Dad was surprised that my brother and I had different favorite villagers opinions. My brother was drawn to the animals he admired in real life, lions and bears and dogs, while I was more willing to branch out and bond with oddballs like Cyrano the anteater. We were both fairly social at school, and many of our friends played Animal Crossing themselves, so we compared notes about villagers we shared. We discussed what gifts Apollo the eagle liked, brainstormed what he’d be like if he went to school with us, and imbued him with the animus of a shared imaginary friend.

Eventually these youthful days waned, and my existing friendships got chilly and dull, as they do when kids’ brain chemistry changes. Best friends become people in math class. Cliques shift, people develop new interests, and who we are in relation to others shifts with the tides as reflected in the cafeteria seating. I fell out of step with the people around me. I felt alienated from my peers, like I had less in common with them every day. When I got Wild World on the DS, I was in middle school and decidedly less social. Nintendogs and my villagers were all the companionship I thought I needed between episodes of Naruto and endless brooding.

But after Wild World, my attitude toward new Animal Crossing towns changed. Where I had previously been giddy to meet my neighbors, move into my sparsely furnished starter home, and get to work fishing and picking fruit, with City Folk I felt like I was just killing time, going through the motions. My neighbors weren’t so novel anymore. I was more focused on decorating and upgrading my house than on building friendships with my fellow citizens. My anthropomorphic buddies were suddenly immaterial to me. Perhaps not inconsequentially, I was doing a lot better in my real world social life around this time: I was in high school, getting more active in extracurriculars like the track team, which often left me too tired to play games, and the theatre club (which is probably not a surprise given the general tenor of this piece). I frequently went to friends’ houses after school and stopped burning away all my evenings playing video games.

I didn’t come back to video games at all until I had finished undergrad and most of my friends had moved away after graduation, leaving me stuck in a familiar place without any familiar faces. Alone in my college town for the summer before starting my first grad program, I bought a 3DS and the then–several years old Animal Crossing: New Leaf. Once again, my social credit was zero. I had no idea who I was or what I was going to do until classes started again, and a gut feeling told me that I would soon be too swamped with academic work to socialize much. My new job as virtual mayor of Our Town (again, theatre kid) in New Leaf gave me some much needed distractions, but here I felt the same acute loneliness from the real world in a different shape: all these villagers, my supposed neighbors and constituents, seemed so familiar to me, but to them I was a stranger. I was a little annoyed that they didn’t recall our shared histories.

As I worked through my grad program, I kept my 3DS around and dipped my feet further into video games. I didn’t have much room for a social life, as predicted, and 20 minutes of Animal Crossing or Fire Emblem here and there were all the distractions I had time for. I waited to get myself a Switch until I’d finished my master’s thesis, as it felt like a good way to put a bow on those years of hard work. I had, much to my surprise, somehow made a few more friends, who were likewise heavy studiers and shared my love for gaming and simulated citizens.

Then I moved to Los Angeles, and my active roster of buddies dropped back to zero.

LA is a strange place to make friends, especially if you’re even tangentially connected to the entertainment industry (and tangentially is definitely what I’d call my playwriting program). Any human connection you might have that’s based on artistic pursuits can end up feeling more like networking than hanging out, and the transactional nature of reading each other’s spec scripts isn’t the steadfast bedrock you might think it is. 

Luckily, the new Animal Crossing loomed on the horizon during my final few months in California, and I was excited to see how I could balance my new island with my new friends when the game launched in March 2020. You can guess where this is going. Sure, we all had Zoom and FaceTime to safely connect us to our loved ones from afar, but did anyone meet anyone new during the majority of that year?

Animal Crossing: New Horizons arrived at a moment of supreme escapist desire, and it delivered a fantasy of tranquility and stability that players sorely needed. We could walk around the island without a care in the world, no masks required, no diseases to fear, while projecting our wish for normalcy onto round-headed animals. When we spoke to our islanders, they had no idea what a pandemic was or who was or wasn’t president. All they knew was what fruit the island had, when K.K. Slider was going into town, and a number of inane card games. These new connections were precious because of how separate they were from reality. These were friends who never wanted to ruin the vibe. 

I again recognized several of my islanders as past associates and had to square all the different versions of them in my head. This is to say nothing of series mainstays like Tom Nook, and Brewster the coffee-brewing pigeon with whom I am common law married in at least a few cultures. They always have the same face, but our connection is limited, resetting after it exceeds the given parameters, namely the time between Animal Crossing releases. Every time we hop in Kapp’n’s taxi or accept another loan from ol’ Tommy Nook, the count turns back to zero. After so many years, after all of the gifts I’d given these critters, all the errands I’d run, all the custom designs and flea market furniture sales and Toy Days and Halloweens, where was our history? Where was the connection to their own past? To the villagers that were, to the person I was?

The answer is obvious, of course: the continuity is in my head and nowhere else. The only place that the New Horizons version of Penny the mouse and I have met is in the past, because she is not a real mouse, just 1s and 0s simulated on multiple screens. Yet I recognize these 1s and 0s as the same cartoon mouse I saw when I was still concerned with lunch money, and I wonder where that link went.

So it goes with people, too. I have met people who felt familiar not because I actually knew them but because they were similar to friends I’d known. They weren’t the same, but I was certain we’d get along. The only problem, of course, is having to actually talk to them. For every person you know, there was a first conversation, an introduction, a slow walk to the current configuration, the stratifying process that sifts strangers into acquaintances, friends, colleagues, romantic partners, or whatever kind of label  might ascribe your connection with another. Meeting someone for the first time and determining if you want to make the commitment of inviting them to stay on your island/in your sphere of influence is a heck of a commitment when you think about how long they might linger,  and people can’t always be so easily shunted off the playing field in real life. Heck, they may even want you to leave the island.

Where I was thrilled to meet new people in school and on the Gamecube, I’m much more circumspect now. I’m over 30; I have a girlfriend and a dog; I have changed my understanding of my gender. The world has given me a lot more to navigate than when I was a kid. I have barely done any managing of my islanders in New Horizon, as the thought of screening and choosing a new islander to fill a spot felt like too much of a hassle and my current neighbors seem charming enough. I’m not the kind of player who opposes having two villagers that are the same animal or screening personality types and aesthetics or tries to make an exclusively deer ethnostate. As in life, I mostly just took people as they came to me, most of whom no longer live anywhere near me. I play it as it lies. 

There is one exception to this laissez-faire attitude. I am not proud of this, but I did what I felt was right at the moment. Opal the elephant was a late arrival on my island, and one I felt an appreciation for very quickly. She seemed even keeled and friendly, despite the Snooty personality the Animal Crossing wiki says she has. We were fast friends, as much friends as you can be with these artificial animals, but then we got a visitor at the campsite: a character named Bluebear. She didn’t know it, of course, but Bluebear and I had a history —  she had moved away early in my Gamecube town and had been a staple in my copy of New Leaf, where she resides to this day. But I wasn’t content with these past Bluebears, not when she was on my island, on my Nintendo Switch, a shining beacon of familiarity in the fog of 2020. 

I had to have Bluebear on my island. I would play as many dumb card guessing games as I had to in order to convince her to move, and when she said she would, I was overjoyed. There was just one catch: my island was full, and someone would have to leave. Isabelle informed me Opal was happy to ship out. 

(My editors have informed me that you can just quit the game and restart until Isabelle offers for someone else to move. I didn’t know. God help me, Opal, I didn’t know.)

I froze. My thumb hovered between the A and B buttons. I set my Switch down and called my girlfriend, uncertain what to do.

“I know you love Bluebear,” she said, laughing through my digitized moral panic.

“What would you do?” I asked.

“I’d probably take her. It’s your game; have fun with it.”

Wherever you are, Opal, I hope you’re happy. I’m sorry that I sacrificed you for Bluebear. Not sorry enough to have not done it, but, you know, sorry nonetheless.