In our current era of global capitalism, we’ve come to accept you can’t get owt for nowt. Imagine my surprise, then, when on 6 May, a stranger from Leeds handed me four solid lumps of gold. Though I tried to offer money in return, the generous 20-year-old refused. Within minutes, she had disappeared.
Yes, it’s probably relevant that this exchange took place in the simulated paradise of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, a game that has been purchased more than 13m times since its March launch. The encounter would have been only marginally more spectacular in real life because gold is valuable in Animal Crossing, too; it can take hours of hitting digital rocks to procure a single lump – and a stranger I met over Facebook gave me four for free.
Since New Horizons exploded in popularity this spring, headlines have lamented that it is a “capitalist dystopia” with a “dark(ish) underbelly”, and the game’s raccoon overlord, Tom Nook, has been nicknamed a “capitalist crook”. Because players have to take out loans in the game, many are coming up with innovative – and exploitative – ways to earn the in-game currency, Bells. On black markets, people are selling their villagers for millions, while others scam players out of their hard-earned items, charge outlandish entry fees to visitors of their islands, and inflate prices for rare furniture and star fragments on the fan-made website Nookazon, the game’s unofficial answer to Amazon. My experiences of the game, however, have been altogether more, well, communist.
Sally is a 19-year-old line cook from Alberta, Canada, who has used James’s subreddit to be generous to strangers. The most coveted neighbour in the game is currently Raymond, a smug feline with heterochromia (one of his eyes is brown and the other is green). Players have been selling Raymond for outlandish prices, with some even spending real-world money to get their hands on the cat. Sally chanced upon Raymond after three days of playing the game and was briefly tempted to trade him for a large sum, but ultimately gave him away for free.
By Guilbert
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