Respect Authority

If you’ve never seen a commercial for Animal Crossing City Folk, well you’re probably just that much less retarded than those of us who have. And decidedly less baffled at the state of video games these days.

I saw a handful of these ads over the weekend and despite having witnessed what’s supposed to be a 30-second selling point for this game, I still have absolutely no idea what the draw is, or why I’d want to buy it.

To enlighten the unenlightened, ACCF seems like a Second Life/The Sims-esque game, whereupon little round-faced characters go about their daily lives in a virtual world, accompanied by other digital cherubs (played by your real-life friends, who consequently need to also be losers). Everyone in the game looks like one of those people toys we had in preschool, that were just a super-round head with a super-cylindrical body. I think we put them on school buses with little cylindrical holes for seats, but my memory’s fuzzy. In any case, the characters of ACCF do things like “check out cafes” or “go shopping” or “take a trip to the city,” with the virtual fun enhanced by the presence of their little avatar friends.

There are obvious points to make here. Primarily that none of the activities undertaken in this game is a particularly lofty real-world aspiration. I could go shopping in the physical world and it would cost me far less time, money and effort than it would to buy and set up a Nintendo Wii with the intention of playing this game. I also, as an adult female — which is clearly who this game is marketed toward if you see the commercials — have absolutely no desire to create a pint-sized cutesy avatar for myself so I can sit in my living room in equally cutesy pajamas, sacrificing face-time with my friends for the kind of place where little adorable people are friends with little adorable animals. I would almost rather shoot myself in my little adorable head.

But more important than the fundamentals of whether this type of game would appeal to, oh I don’t know, a sane person, is that I have no sense of what the commercials are telling me. All of the women featured are in their mid to late 20s, all seem to be proud owners of nice apartments or houses, most with flat-screen TVs. And all prefer talking to their girlfriends in serene and oddly un-enthusiastic voices about the various virtual activities they’re supposed to be enthusiastic about. Maybe I misunderstood something, but this game seems very seriously geared toward women on Valium, or Zoloft, or whatever drug would make them perpetually calm, and capable of being entertained by something that very much looks like a preschool level video game.

The game’s slogan on its site — which, consequently, is worth a visit — is “If life were a permanent vacation, what would you do?” Well Nintendo, I’d do a lot of things, but literally not one single thing would involve playing this mind-numbing excuse for a game.