Don't Reset the Game
A recovered tale
Dear AY readers,
I’m travelling this week and don’t have time to write something new. Fortunately, however, I have some old bits and pieces saved up to post here in times like this. The following tale (narrative essay? semi-fiction?) is a piece I wrote in the spring of 2020, at the height of the pandemic and the tail end of my undergrad, and last revised (in vain hopes for publication, evidently) in the spring of 2021. From my present standpoint—two degrees, several jobs, and three temporary homes removed from the situation of the narrator (and less one GameCube and one Wii, plus one Switch—thanks bro!)—the experiences and feelings related in this work, not to mention some features of its style and sensibility, are just as much “phantom memories” as the childhood episodes the narrator gradually recollects. Now not just life before the pandemic, but the pandemic itself, feels to me like a “distant dream”. I recover this tale from my archives (and submit it for review by internet strangers) in similar hopes of remembering.
—JD
Toronto, August 2025
I don’t remember the last time I played Animal Crossing on the GameCube.
In the Animal Crossing series, a Nintendo mainstay, you play as a human villager in a town of anthropomorphic animals. After the COVID-19 pandemic hit North America and social distancing began in full force, my Twitter timeline was flooded with references to the latest installment in the series, Animal Crossing: New Horizons on the Nintendo Switch. Released on March 20th, 2020, the game hit with perfect timing—a remedy to panic, despair, and sheer boredom as workplaces and gathering sites closed down. The fourth estate was quick to sing the game’s praises: “It’s solitude done right, and a great way to spend the hours you’re stuck inside social distancing,” wrote Melanie Woods in the Huffington Post. Brett Molina of USA Today heralded it as a “sanctuary” from “our current climate.” In Wired, Louryn Strampe proclaimed New Horizons “the game we all need right now.”
But I don’t own a Switch, and I can’t afford to buy one now. It’s some time in April 2020; I’m unemployed, and the summer jobs I was gunning for fell through as the virus got real in employers’ minds. I’m stuck at home, and the final year of my degree is set to play out on Zoom calls. After March 11th, when my winter classes were suspended, I settled into a routine of compulsive social media checks, stretches of anxiousness or wistfulness, and all-pervading lethargy. A Tweet thread from a psychologist said my body was reacting to the crisis, making me tired and overwrought even when I’m doing shit all. The chief medical officer of my province told me I should go for walks on my own, cultivate healthy habits. Animal Crossing Twitter urged me to found a settlement on a desert island.
I’ve decided to do the next-best thing: return to my old file on the original Animal Crossing, released worldwide for the GameCube in 2001. Later installments have added bells and whistles. New Leaf on 3DS makes you the mayor of the town; New Horizons has you play the part of a frontiersman. But the original kept things simple. You dig for fossils; you decorate your home; you run errands for your neighbors. It was the first videogame my older brother and I owned, the gift of a friend of our sister who wanted to get it off her hands. We logged days of play together in our town. But now I don’t remember my town, nor my neighbors. Everything pre-pandemic feels like a distant dream, and I haven’t lived long enough for my early memories to rush back in a flood. Yet in this time of both panic and quietude, such artifacts of my childhood have called me back.
I find my GameCube in a corner of my bedroom, tucked away next to the Wii, and haul it by its black handlebar over to the television. Our games and memory cards are nowhere to be found, so I launch a search of the house. I open the miniature door that leads into a “secret passageway” running under the eaves of the house, snaking between the corner of my bedroom and the linen closet in the hallway. We used to play in here, my siblings and I, magicking this dusty gap in our family home into a superspy base. These days it’s not so secret, nor a passageway, as our mother had the hall-side end sealed off when she revamped her linen closet. I drop onto my stomach and peer inside: my Playmobil sets, a box of my sister’s childhood things, but not the videogame I’m looking for. I run down to the basement, to the suitcase room, to the old books room—but no luck.
When I come back upstairs, my mother has pulled open my own closet door. Right in front of me is a wicker basket, leaning Pisa-like with the unevenly distributed weight of a dusty PlayStation 2. I pull back a nest of wires to reveal rows of game cases—and there it is. I have the game disc, but still no memory card. Then with a jolt, I remember that we’d left the GameCube memory cards in the Wii, since Wiis have backwards compatibility. (For the boomers reading, this means the Wii console can play GameCube games.) I hook up the Wii, pop in the disc, wait for a Wii Remote to charge… and finally, I play the game. I let the start screen play over a couple times as I prepare my heart for whatever is to come. The title Animal CrossingTM is splayed over a panorama of the town in big bubble letters. I press start. A pig with smooth, rusty red fur and big, glowering eyes stands under a spotlight, looking out from the screen to me.
“Oh! So you’re back, huh, swine?” Rasher the pig says. “It’s August 28th, 2030, at 8:21 p.m. in Slot B’s werty now.”
When the pig asks, I confirm I’m the town resident named “!!”: two exclamation marks. That, I presume, is the last name I cared to give myself in this world, though I don’t remember it at all.
“Wow! I didn’t even recognize you, ‘!!’!” Rasher says. “Actually, I totally forgot about you.”
Same to you, asshole, I say aloud. But of course, the pig can’t hear me.
Finally, I’m in: On the next screen, a mole named Resetti scolds me for clicking the reset button last time I played. Resetting the game apparently has dire consequences, though even now I’m still unclear on just what these consequences are.
“Wanting to do what you’re told NOT to do is HUMAN nature,” Resetti says.
Perhaps the reset button ban is a sneaky test, then, of the player’s self-control. He’s got me there, that clever mole. I’ve appeared outside a house—my house, I assume—so I go inside to get my bearings. It’s bare: a writing desk, a tape deck, and two cockroaches. I remember this part; I squish the cockroaches and their ghosts fly into the air. I check out the journal on the desk… no entries since at least September 2029, which is as far back as it goes. I go back outside and check my mailbox: I have a letter from the Farway Museum, inviting me to take part in its “fossil identification program.” The letter’s written on an elegant scroll of flowing parchment. With the dust it’s gathered over more than a decade in game years, I bet it would look at home in the museum itself.
My house is one of four positioned around what looks to be a notice board in the centre. I check the board: All town residents are free to use this bulletin board to post notices and messages, reads entry 1. Let’s keep it tasteful, folks. This entry’s dated to December 25, 2009, which must have been !!’s move-in date to werty. The others—for New Year’s, for a Fishing Tourney, for a Fireworks Festival—are dated to early January, then June and July, 2010. Someone named Chip posted a follow-up to the Fishing Tourney on June 23rd—the day after my twelfth birthday. My first thought: I must have partaken in that Tourney the day before, thus triggering the notice within the game. But that can’t be right, I realize, since I would have checked my mail after moving into town, seen the museum’s welcome letter. Though hard to say for sure without knowing the ins and outs of in-game responses to gameplay. I pause the game to look this up in the series’s Wiki, but no answer turns up.
I try to think fondly of Animal Crossing, of the town I’ve reclaimed. I’m reminded of The Wind in the Willows, which I read, I think, a few years before I discovered videogames. The novel opens with Mole leaving his burrow, tired of spring cleaning, and stumbling upon the river Thames for the first time. He befriends Rat, a water vole, and promptly moves in with him. They enjoy misadventures with Badger and Toad and even the god Pan. But on a winter hike with his roommate, Mole’s old burrow calls him back with “one of those mysterious fairy calls from the void.”1 Mole is blown over with feeling, with nostalgia for familiar trappings and regret for his neglect. Following his nose and his heart, he goes home. Written in 1908, when England was already less the garden of Pan and more the quarry of industry, the novel expresses a yearning for nature and our innocent love for it, a yearning for all that the lockstep march of purported progress has swept away.
I yearn for my old burrow, hoping my childhood Animal Crossing town will welcome me back just as did Mole’s bits and bobs. But with muted dismay, I recognize that this town called werty is not the old burrow I’d hoped for. The empty house, the museum invitation, the notice board’s entry dates: these bits of evidence come together in my head. For whatever reason, looks like my eleven-year-old-self deleted the file I’d played as a little kid, to start afresh. Set the new file 10 years ahead just as a bit. A realization: I must have reset the game in the hopes of not saving this new file, undoing my reckless erasure of the town my brother and I had grown up with. A faint outline of this memory appears in my mind, though I can’t quite grasp the details. Games got rules, and rules got consequences, Resetti has just told me. Consequences, that’s for sure: my childhood village is irretrievably lost.
I remain paused. Now The Wind in the Willows wasn’t the first classic story to express a yearning for nature, for pastoral life and everything we’ve lost. On the other side of the world hundreds of years earlier, the ancient Chinese poet Tao Qian left the civil service behind to live on a small farm, far away from the intrigue of urban politics. Tao’s classic work The Peach Blossom Spring tells the story of a fisherman who hits upon a secret passageway in a mountain, at the head of a spring ringed by peach blossoms, and discovers a village hidden on the other side. The villagers’ ancestors left the public world behind in China’s fractious Warring States Period, and their descendants have no desire to wade back into the muck.2 Like Tao’s fisherman, I too have gone through a secret passageway in search of an agrarian utopia, albeit within the confines of my home.
Tao felt a yearning for a world already gone—where the state was no more than a small farming village, the whole of nature our backyard—because his world was in tatters, full of war and strife. Perhaps this yearning springs up when the world’s a mess; or perhaps it’s always present, like the lingering ghost of Pan (or a videogame cockroach), waiting to remind us of what’s missing when we need it most. It’s telling that Miho, a new Japanese religion that touts natural aesthetics as an antidote to Japan’s late capitalist ennui, has modelled its museum on the hidden village in Tao’s tale. The building rests on a mountaintop above Kyoto, accessible only by a tunnel through a mountain. Filled with relics of ancient civilizations, from Egypt to China, the museum stakes a claim to the global classical world, to collective historical memories we’re desperate to reconjure.
Now unlike the minds behind Miho, Animal Crossing creator Katsuya Eguchi presumably had no illusions that his videogame would be the salvation of his nation. But nonetheless, he designed it to recreate his experience as a homesick young man, my age, when he had just moved from his hometown to big-city Kyoto. You get letters from your in-game parents; you might share a town with your real-life family. In Eguchi’s vision, amid peach trees and reclusive villagers, we remember our true homes. The town of werty may not be the one I grew up with, but it might just satisfy my own yearning for the likes of the peach blossom spring. That, at least, is my revised hope.
I unpause. I prepare to face my neighbors, these old new ones, see who remembers me and whom I might remember back. I walk through acres now ridden with years’ worth of weeds. Finally I find another house. I speak to the green duck standing outside it.
“It’s been nearly 248 months since we last hung out!” Scoot the duck tells me. “Not to be a big crybaby or anything, but I figured you’d completely forgotten I existed, zip zoom!”
In real life, I look down from the screen in a moment of awkward shame. In my werty life, however, I stare at the duck blankly. I look in my inventory—once I remember what button to press on my GameCube controller—and realize I have a delivery for Scoot from Tom Nook, the shopkeeper tanuki (in English, raccoon-dog). 248 months late. I pass the delivery over, and Scoot gives me a new bed in exchange. He tells me not to worry about running errands like this to make my bread.
“That’s the way it goes in the big ol’ real world,” the duck says. “Don’t worry about it, zip zoom!”
I read a sign planted in the dirt, which encourages me to “play the market” at Sow Joan’s turnip sale on Sunday mornings. With a student loan and no summer work, running errands and playing the market may be my best bet. I’ll try to heed Scoot’s advice—don’t worry about it. I head into a big red barn with a green roof, which turns out to be the Able sisters’ design shop. I buy a new outfit with my meager savings, a few hundred Bells (the in-game currency). I meet a bear named Grizzly and a white duck named Pompom, neither of whom recognize me: looks like they moved in some time after me over the last twenty years.
“You seem kinda lost to me…” Pompom says.
She’s right, I think; I am lost. Each acre looks like the last; I forget which residents I’ve already talked to. I’ve got the creeps. Thus far, my return to Animal Crossing hasn’t measured up to the bright rosy towns I see on my Twitter feed, nor has it compared to Mole’s rediscovery of a beloved old home. It’s no escape, nor homecoming, but a foray into the uncanny—a disturbing experience, where something once but no longer familiar has returned as unfamiliar. As Freud had it, you feel this creeping, crawling, quiet feeling when some ghost of a memory arrives to drag you toward the fantasies and fears boxed up in the secret passageways of your subconscious.3 I feel the uncanny now, comparing these blocky, pixelated creatures onscreen to the stuffed animals stored away in my closet, just behind the wicker basket of videogames.
I press B repeatedly to rush through my chat with Pompom, as I wonder if our eventual return from social distancing will be as uncanny as all this. Our neighbors and their dogs, slightly uneasy; our friends and their old habits, slightly absent: everything once familiar now haunting, returned but just not quite the same. I keep walking. I pick up some new stationary from the dump, then finally I make it to a shabby plyboard shack: Nook’s Cranny.
“AGHHH!” Tom Nook yells at the sight of me. “Why did you change out of your uniform, hm? Just who gave you permission to do that, I’m wondering?” He embarks on a rant about the good old days before casual workplaces, but stops himself short. “I suppose I must change with the times, yes?” he says. “Wear whatever you like!” Though he adds I can’t wear anything that would make his customers uncomfortable. “That’s just the way society works, you understand?” he explains. “Sometimes you have to obey the rules, yes?”
Nook calls me his “worker bee” and gives me 230 Bells for delivering the furniture to Scoot. He provides me a map so I can find my way around town, then tasks me with writing a letter to a “very loyal customer” named Gwen. He tells me he’s old, not hip like me, but I reckon he hasn’t aged a bit in 248 months. Save for the accumulated weeds, the town seems to have been standing frozen in motion, like a taxidermy diorama made of polygons, waiting for my return. Or for the return of the avatar !!, whoever happens to pick up the controller and breathe him back to life.
I check my map and locate the post office, then draft and deposit my letter to Gwen: I’ve been away so long. I remember so little. Nothing, really. Please, help me. Can you tell me who I am? It’s a chore to scroll through onscreen letters and symbols with my joystick, so I leave my cry for help there, call it a bit of fantasy gone too far. Soon enough I’ve found Gwen herself, a pudgy little pink penguin, who—of course—remarks on my 248-month absence.
“I’m certain you’ve acquired vast wealth since the last time we met,” she remarks. “Or perhaps you’ve just been slacking off the entire time, hm, h-h-h-hon?”
Easy for the socialite Gwen to say: in her house she has a plush couch, a grandfather clock, and a grand piano. I return to Nook, who gives me only 130 Bells since I took “longer than he’d have liked.” I have no way to fight him on this one, so I leave Nook’s Cranny in a flash. I don’t know why, even in this idyllic seaside village, I’m stuck in the gig economy. I do know I’ve got to get out. I run. At the north end of town is a railway station—but the porter, a simpering monkey, says the train won’t be coming for a pretty long time.
The town of werty, I now know, is nothing close to Tao Qian’s utopia. Though attempting an escape from city life, Animal Crossing reproduces its core maladies. I’m surrounded by uncanny reminders of the market, from Sow Joan’s ad to Gwen’s model home. On my old file, I remember, I kept up a commerce of bugs and fossils, furniture and clothing, to pay back my loans to Tom Nook. This seaside village is a far cry from Mole’s burrow or Tao Qian’s farm. In fact, the much-lauded New Horizons leans into market economics more than ever. By the game’s narrative framing, the Rhodesian colonist Nook has sold the player a “getaway package” to that tropical island, prompting the player to take out and pay off increasingly high loans to build their settlement from scratch. But why am I surprised? For all his whimsy, Mario serves a monarchy. For all its friendliness, Nintendo is a corporation. And for all its charms, Animal Crossing is as capitalist a media product as any.
I walk by the Farway Museum, but I decide I’m done and don’t go in. I return to my shack. I try to pretend that the crude, cobblestone pixels on my television screen are a retreat from my waking world, into whatever world belonged to my agrarian ancestors. My tween-self didn’t know, or didn’t care, that he was sealing me off from phantom memories, just as a home renovation cut off our secret passageway. I put down my bed from Scoot, lie down, then press save and quit.
“Finished already?” Grizzly asks, lit up under spotlight at the exit screen.
I say nothing; I shut off the Wii. I now remember, I suppose, the last time I played Animal Crossing, though it’s turned out to be far from a homecoming or utopian retreat. Where I searched for the familiar and idyllic, I found only the uncanny and the commercial. Not the prodigal son’s return, but his rock bottom envying the pigs. I walk to my desk; I refresh Twitter. I yearn for a natural world that welcomes us, its fair-weather friends, back home. I yearn to remember Animal Crossing as I expected to remember it: all smiles, all peace, all plain straightforward wholesome fun. I yearn for something more, but I don’t remember much else.
Thanks for reading. :) A point of housekeeping: I have added sections to the homepage and updated the posts in my archive to place them in these sections. In this way I mean to cordone off culture wars stuff and quick takes (“Commentary”), as well as announcements, replies to comments, and the like (“Paratexts”), separating these lower forms of blogging from higher-minded philosophical interpretation and ragged theorizing (“Philosophy”), literary essays and reviews (“Criticism”), and more adventurous exercises in narrative writing (“Stories”). Already, in trying to categorize my extant posts, I have found the borders of these genre categories to be porous indeed. Stories can flirt with criticism, commentary can draw from philosophical resources, announcements and replies can extend commentary, and philosophy can engage with literature. But still, I think these sections will do for the task of organizing my writing here, both as an effort at imposing order on my sundry interests and for the sake of orienting readers.
—Again, JD, Toronto, August 2025
Grahame, Kenneth. (1908). The Wind in the Willows. Project Gutenberg. Quote from Chapter V.
Tao Qian. (421 CE). The Peach Blossom Spring. The Shorter Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature, 364-367. Edited by Victor H. Mair. New York: Columbia University Press.
In Freud, Sigmund. (1919). The ‘Uncanny’. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917-1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, 217-256.
This is a sweet story with a shadow of loss, of childhood memories, partially irrecoverable.