De-weeding fields, watering plants, housecleaning, selling turnips, meticulously moving furniture: monotonous and tiresome chores in real life, yet engaging and infinitely addictive gameplay mechanics in the wildly popular life simulation genre! Sure, you could roam the treacherous world of Skyrim, slay dragons, clash swords with rogues, and cast powerful spells as a High Elf, but there’s something innately stress-relieving and wholesome about the simplistic rural life escapades found in the likes of Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley.
In these games in particular, restoring a dilapidated farm, building relationships with neighbours, and writing up comprehensive schedules to plan a hard days farming offers an immersive reality in which you can escape the daily grind of everyday life by escaping into someone else’s everyday life. During the current pandemic, these games have reached greater appeal, with a heightened sense of appreciation for their simplistic charm and the regular structure they bring to each game session, with Animal Crossing: New Horizons leading the charge.
Yet while the appeal of the calming escapist fantasy presented by Animal Crossing’s tropical island getaway is immediately relatable, pandemic fiction across all platforms has also seen a dramatic increase in interest, with the likes of the 2011 Steven Soderbergh Contagion, and of course the timely release of Resident Evil 3 Remake and upcoming The Last of Us Part II. Quite the antithesis of Animal Crossing’s tranquil pudgy animal island getaway. So why pandemic fiction as well?
In the event of a global pandemic we have little-to-no control over, manifesting the contagion as a humanoid or otherwise “alien” enemy allows us to humanise it and vent our personal and social anxieties. More often than not, there’s a hero overcoming great odds – hordes of zombies and vicious bandits, for instance – where the “good guy/ bad guy” motif echoes the moral laws of modern society. Naturally, we typically side with the “good guy” who usually survives to the end, implying that if they can beat or survive it, so can we. In a sense, this gives us a feeling of control over the situation. After all, nothing says “assertive human dominance over a rampaging virus” like smacking a baseball bat into the face of a Clicker or zombie.
Clearly this is a far different type of escapism than what is on offer in Animal Crossing and the life-sim genre as a whole. While escaping reality to the safety of a deserted island or the rigid gameplay loop of Harvest Moon seems the most obviously appealing route during the current pandemic, our own morbid curiosity sees us seeking out fantastical parallels with our current crisis in an attempt to rationalise it and give us a sense of understanding and control. Life simulation games give us somewhere to turn to to forget about the real world, offering something creative to focus on, while pandemic fiction can be seen as a way to face the issue in a more controllable environment. That and there’s something satisfying about pulling off headshots in Resident Evil 4…
During lockdown, it’s only natural that we feel the pressure of being socially isolated from one another. Even though we can connect through social media, or even texting and phoning one another, it’s just not the same as going out and socialising in person. Animal Crossing: New Horizons tasks players with the goal of building up the initially empty, overgrown, weed-infested island into a thriving community of humanoid animals, resembling something like an anthropomorphic animal paradise. Similarly, in Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town the main character inherits a neglected farm to rebuild, forging relationships with the NPCs in the town, around restoring the farm. Both Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing place emphasis on building strong social connections, fulfilling our need to feel part of a social community. What’s more, the popularity of New Horizons has sparked a thriving online community where people have been sharing their island designs with tour videos, or by inviting friends to visit their islands through the Switch Online service. Certainly isn’t the same, but it helps provide a feeling of connectivity even during lockdown.
The idea of building or rebuilding a town or farm, the epicentre of Harvest Moon’s social circle, stimulates us by making us feel like we’re accomplishing something and working towards a grand goal, while reestablishing a sense of community missing from our current situation, even if it is only simulated. On the other hand, the post-apocalyptic setting of The Last of Us, or even The Walking Dead, show us a civilisation attempting to rebuild in smaller communities in the aftermath of a great pandemic. While building a paradise community plays into our impression of true escapism, rekindling our feelings of community and belonging, the rebuilding of society in the post-apocalypse setting gives an impression that no matter how bad the pandemic gets, seeing how exaggerated and fantastical it is in these worlds, there is a feeling of hope that our own society can rebuild and heal as well.
Throughout this pandemic, we have been caught between two polarising attractions in our search to escape from or cope with the current situation. On one hand we look forward to building a new, more stable future – as in Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon – yet we’re also mesmerised by the morbidity and sensational events of today, analogous to the fantastical scenarios of pandemic fiction. The lethal, very real threat of the pandemic was something which could only have existed in the pages and film reels of apocalyptic fiction before, and while the scale of our situation certainly seems comparable, we’re also dealing with brutal politics and radical social changes to build towards a better future.
