Animal Crossing New Horizon: Do You Wanna Build a Museum?
Tragedy had befallen me.
Sometime in early May, my Nintendo Switch no longer recognised the 256GB Micro SD card which held my videogame data for that particular console. And, in fact, the connection for the port that held any and all SD cards appeared to have been disconnected. Also despite my efforts to troubleshoot the issue, the fan continued to increase in speed and noise whenever I ran any software on the console indicating the heatsink was absorbing the amount heat produced by the cpu. I was in a good enough financial place that I was able to replace my Nintendo Switch (just the handheld portion, my dock still worked fine) and I began moving my cloud-based data over to my new Nintendo Switch. Things seemed to be on the up and up, and I was relieved that none of my Legend of Zelda saves had been lost. The consideration that I might have to restart those hunts for Korok seeds gave my eye a slight twitch for 72 hours. It was about the time I was redownloading DOOM that I remembered Animal Crossing New Horizons. I still needed to finish collecting insects, birds, art, and dinosaur bones to give to Blathers, and I couldn’t forget the joy of going to the Roost, talking to Bewster, and grabbing coffee.
It was here that the blow of tragedy revealed that the loss of the first Nintendo Switch was but the stab of the knife. Now it was time for misfortune to twist the blade and inflict the wretched wound.
There was no save data for Animal Crossing New Horizons.
It was gone.
I try, to the best of my ability, to not dwell too much on negativity. This is partly the result of living with clinical depression, low self-esteem, and an overly-analytical mind which zeroes in on failure as any indication that I am in fact a waste of space and a loser. There was (at least) 60 hours of Animal Crossing New Horizons which were now, effectively, gone.
Faced with this wretched condition I had two options: First, I could wallow in misery and mourn the loss of my former island-city of Pandora over a series of years culminating in a psychotic break that would involve paintball guns, the death mask of Tutankhamun, 437 stolen puffins, and at least three flute players from the London Symphony Orchestra. The second option was that I could start a new town and begin the process of building all over again.
For my own sake, and due to financial realities, I chose the latter option.
I feel confident that my former therapist would have called that progress.
She also would have told me to listen to a Mountain Goats song.
Whenever I approach playing Animal Crossing I recognise that some people appreciate the game for it’s social dynamics, as well as the SIMS-esque gameplay of acquiring furniture and making a digital home-space to “live” in. I myself approach playing Animal Crossing New Horizons almost exclusively for the museum. I also have to be honest and point out that since the first Animal Crossing game was released in 2001 that’s constituted most of my actual gameplay.
But before I disappear into my obsession with collecting fauna, I need to cover the general info about what Animal Crossing New Horizons is as a videogame.
Game art cover provided by The Cover Project.
Released for the Nintendo Switch on the 20 March 2020 (same day as Doom Eternal) Animal Crossing New Horizons is the latest in the Animal Crossing franchise. Like the previous entries the game is about a customizable human avatar who moves to a new city populated by anthropomorphic animals. However unlike previous entries, this village is situated on a deserted island. The recurring character and only good landlord in existence Tom Nook has decided to establish a new business venture by setting up islands where people will create new homes, new towns, and establish cultural hubs all throughout this nameless space of ocean. When the player arrives the island it will be just a patch of land with trees, hills, waterfalls, rivers, and a few patches of land allocated for villagers. The goal of the game is to work with Tom Nook to create various infrastructure projects, new homes, beautification initiatives, and cultural attractions.
Which, on that note is where the Museum comes in.
Every Animal Crossing videogame (except maybe that one mobile game, but I don’t believe that one’s cannon so we’ll leave it out) has had a museum. This building is iconic for its marble exterior, ionic roman columns, and empty stone pediment. The museum looks like every cartoon museum from every animated show which has ever, and probably will ever exist. The facade of the building is stuffy and grandiose in a way that’s charming when set against the rest of the island which is usually just a messy forest filled with bugs.
But that’s the charm dang it, and one of the reasons why I love it.
When I started Animal Crossing New Horizons I was, honestly, more than a tad peeved that there was not a museum waiting for me. Ever since I received the original Animal Crossing for Nintendo Gamecube as a Christmas Present in 2001 I’ve been obsessed with filling the museum with insects, dinosaur bones, artwork, and fish. The fact that I had to relay every new biological discovery through Tom Nook for the first few days of playing was frustrating. Actually, speaking honestly it just plain sucked. I missed Blather, the cute owl docent with his argyle sweater vest that was actually just his belly-feathers. I was used to having Blathers waiting for me ready to receive any donation I acquired at a moment's notice, and the idea that I had to develop the island was annoying…until it was actually fun.
For anyone who hasn’t played Animal Crossing: New Horizons (or read my previous essay about catching tarantulas) the narrative structure of the game is different from its previous installations because this game employs far more building mechanics. For perspective the first Animal Crossing videogame was a SIMs stand-in where the goal of the game was to just be. There was the goal of paying off my mortgage, but given the fact I could take my time and there was no interest this was never a priority. Players could just be, in the purest sense, and I spent plenty of hours just talking to my neighbors, doing errands, and collecting furniture. This changed to some extent when Animal Crossing : New Leaf and Animal Crossing Wild World were released for the Nintendo DS and Nintendo 3DS because both of those games introduced new characters (like Isabel who deserves her own essay and/or game but that’s for another day), but, more importantly, they began introducing public works projects such as building bridges. Animal Crossing: New Horizons continues to employ these elements, but unlike the previous two games it dramatically alters how players can build their village.
For example New Horizons introduced the options to relocate homes, businesses, and government buildings. Players can create paved roads and even fencing all around the island. Furniture items can be placed outside of homes thus allowing villagers the chance to interact with objects that normally would be left just inside their dwelling. And if the player progresses far enough they are even given the option to terraform the island, meaning they can remove and replace squares of land to reshape the layout of the terrain. The internet abounds with images and videos of people reshaping their island into beautiful mazes of flowers, statues, and hills.
I’ll be honest, all of this…hardly interests me when I play Animal Crossing.
I’m far more concerned with filling the Museum with exhibits. This is because this side-quest, for lack of a better word, gives me the chance for so many different actions that are each rewarding for their own reasons.
I can catch a literal whale shark in Animal Crossing New Horizons.
I can fill a wing in the insect hall with butterflies(and then take my girlfriend on a disgustingly adorable date to it).
I can purchase the print Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Katsushika Hokusai or the Olmec Colossal Head.
I can dig up the skeletons of wooly mammoths, Iguanodons, spinosaurus, velociraptors, and triceratopses and place them on display.
From a design perspective the museum provides players with a collectathon side-quest. Technically speaking I could play Animal Crossing: New Horizons for hundreds of hours catching every insect and fish in the game and never once donate any of them to Blathers. I could just as easily sell them to Timmy and Tommy at Nook’s Cranny, I could place them in my home as decoration, or I could just as easily release them back into the wild. These are options I could take, but instead I typically dedicate my energy to finding anything and everything living and donating it to Blathers reveling in his joy when I bring in new fossils or watching him squirm as he has to give the biological facts about some species of butterfly I’ve delivered. There’s something about his unabashed “nerdom” that I find endearing (or painfully familiar(I’m not sure which)).
But the appeal of this side-quest it’s not just Blathers.
One dashingly handsome owl could never carry a museum alone.
Animal Crossing New Horizons’ museum is arguably one of the most beautiful elements of the game because it’s not just a few tanks or patches of grass. Each section of the museum has expanded to include multiple wings. For example the Fossil exhibition is broken into three rooms, the two smaller rooms dedicated to the smaller fossils as well as more recent organisms such as the wooly mammoth, saber-toothed tiger, and even an australopithecine skull. The insect wing of the museum boasts a similar feature with a main area allocated to the beetles, cicadas, dragonflies, and even the water-based insects that can be caught in the game. Going through one door on the left hand side will take the player to the butterfly room. This room is, simply put, stunning. There’s a fountain in the center with flower patches forming an octagonal shape around the edges of the room and the air is filled with every butterfly that the player will catch over time. Benches on the fountain itself have allowed couples everywhere the perfect chance to capture proof that they have internet connections.
Sarcasm aside, I want to note for the record I have taken my girlfriend on a date to my island. She chased me with an ax across the beach and then we held hands in the butterfly room.
It was cute.
Walking through the hallways of the museum I’m struck by the sounds. The museum’s background music hasn’t changed in terms of its base melody, however New Horizons has adjusted the music so that each wing of the museum has a different tonal quality. The fish wing creates a sonorous tone that mimics water while a gentle piano drops the notes of the melody into the piece almost like raindrops. The dinosaur exhibit also employs a piano however it’s sound quality is rustic and it reverberates and echoes, mimicking the eons that have passed or the heavy footsteps of the creatures whose skeletons are now all that’s left. The insect wing replaces the gentle piano with an acoustic guitar creating a familiar and organic presence; the player is transported to the woods where these arthropods might be crawling on trees or the dirt beneath their feet. Finally, the art museum employs a harpsichord generating a posh atmosphere that hearkens to regency era PBS sitcoms that are as ludicrously pompous as they are unironically entertaining. These musical compositions each contribute to the aesthetic tone of the place, and each sequence elicits a different emotional response from me as I walk through them.
The Roost, the coffeeshop operated by Brewster, has its own musical composition, but if I’m being honest I’m probably going to write an entire essay about this cafe sometime in the future. So for now I’ll just note that, while different, The Roost furthers the gentle musical presence that envelopes players while they walk through its halls and rooms.
And on the note of walking it’s important to note that the most striking auditory fixture of the building is my footsteps.
My girlfriend reminded me, when I asked her what her favorite part of the Museum was, that she loved just hearing her footsteps. I had to agree with her. Every step a player makes along the floors will create a distinct knock-knock-knock that reverberates through the halls. Maybe it’s nostalgia, maybe it’s the media I’ve consumed (maybe it’s Maybelline?), but this sound of footsteps across stone reminds me of the depth of the space I’m in. The Museum is a large mostly empty building, and when it becomes filled with the sounds of life, there’s still the vastness of the edifice that is a firm but gentle reminder than the organisms that frequent these halls are just here for a moment.
I’m not alone in this building however.
Aside from the music, one of the charms of museums is when I encounter other villagers roaming its halls. Recently while I was wandering the Dinosaur exhibits one of my villagers [NAME***] was staring at the spinosaurus. Apart from the fact that he’s an adorable white powderpuff in a red sweater, the sight of another villager staring at these exhibits always leaves me pondering. I know that, ultimately, this is a software program and that these non-playable characters(npcs) are driven by code that’s created in-game AI. Nothing compelled this character to this space other than the base programming of the game. But, this is media, and extended time with it creates emotional attachments. Watching my villagers look at these fish, insects, paintings, arachnids, sculptures, and bones begins to create a sense of community.
This isn’t my museum, it’s the island’s museum and I’m just one part of what makes it what it is.
Though I have, more than anyone else, contributed the most to it.
Each of the exhibits has a small plaque where players can see the name of whatever object or organism is on display, but after that there will be a notice informing the player who donated it and on what date. This feature turns the Museum displays of Animal Crossing New Horizons into a unique journal. Though I’ve fallen out of the habit as of this writing, I used to keep a journal of the day's events for myself. I would write down the date and all of the activities that I did during the course of the day from cooking food, doing laundry, playing videogames, reading certain books, going to the movies with my girlfriend, etc. The Museum affords players something similar. Going to the open ocean section, distinct for the massive tank that will eventually house a great white shark, a sun fish, a tuna, a whale shark, a school of anchovies, and one tiny horse mackerel, I can look through the roster of fish and see where I was on a particular date and what I caught. This doesn’t give any other information besides reminding myself that I was playing Animal Crossing New Horizons, but that in and of itself is the point. I was playing this game and enjoying myself as I worked steadily to fill this enormous tank with colossal and minuscule fish.
My effort in this essay wasn’t simply to gush about Animal Crossing New Horizons and how much I love playing it. I had a question when I approached this essay: why do I enjoy the museum component more than any other feature of the game?
A lifetime of playing videogames, and reflecting on a lifetime of habits has led to me a relatively simple answer.
Filling the museum is one more in a long line of building simulators.
And, just so it’s clear, I don’t have a problem with that.
A criticism of Animal Crossing New Horizon(and the entire franchise) is that it’s a game where, quote, “nothing happens.” This sentence usually translates to “you can’t shoot, stab, or kill people.” As a fan of DOOM I understand why someone would look at the gameplay of any of the Animal Crossing games and assume that it’s boring. Compared to shoving a chainsaw into the chest of a cyberdemon while blasting imps with my shotgun, trying to catch a salmon or rearrange furniture in my living room seems ridiculous. Why would anyone want to do mundane tasks in a videogame when there are games that allow players the chance to kill monsters, go on crazy adventures, or even save the universe.
The most obvious answer is that games like that are shooting for a different aesthetic goal.
Animal Crossing New Horizon is not a first person shooter(fps) and it never will be.
But after this answer, I look back to my own motivations playing the game.
When I play Animal Crossing I know that the game is going to be about building; it’s going to be about building a home, building a town, building relationships with my neighbors, building furniture and beatification structures, and it’s going to be about building a Museum. Animal Crossing New Horizons is deceptively simple in its gameplay but it reveals a terribly human compulsion to remake the world in our own likeness. Human beings desire companionship as much as they desire to build a space that reflects their energies and values. Whether it’s building fences, food, furniture, etc. the opportunity to build the island into something distinctly my own provides me, and players all over the world, an intellectual and emotional solace that runs deeper than the cute superficial chibi atmosphere of the game.
While thinking of this I was reminded of a short essay I wrote about Death Stranding. That essay was about why I enjoy rebuilding highways, and honestly I love building structures in the game period. Whether it’s watchtowers, power stations, safe houses, or Timefall Shelters, each of these structures are tools that help survive and deliver packages while I navigate the protagonist Sam from city to city and Prepper station to prepper station. Rebuilding America involves a lot of walking, but it also entails a colossal amount of building simulation, and Death Stranding is unique because players can activate cooperative play which allows players all over the world to use each other’s roads, structures, tools, etc. The game becomes a collaborative effort to improve this simulated America and help each other help each other make this space better than it once was.
I never thought Death Stranding would make me think about Animal Crossing, and yet here we are. They’re both games about forming connections and building a new world for the betterment of others.
On this same note, I just realized there’s a universe where Hideo Kojima developed Animal Crossing instead of Katsuya Eguchi and now I need to play that videogame.
What was I doing again?
Oh right, final summation.
I’ve tried, in my most recent playthrough, to work more towards building the aesthetic of the island outside of the museum, and I have. I’ve actually built individual fencing for my villagers, planted flowers everywhere, worked towards building bridges and inclines, and zoned the island to try and make districts for living and entertainment venues. But no matter what I still find myself moving my avatar to the museum to just stop and stare at the fish swimming in their tanks. Watching a gar or an arowana swim gently while the piano gently knocks its notes into the fluid melody I know where I am and I’m happy.
I’ve built a digital space that’s brimming with life, sounds, and images. It’s beautiful.
It’s a little joy, slowly building a full museum, and even when it’s full there’s plenty of reasons to stop in, and not just because of the coffee.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
7.28.2025
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