Review: Animal Crossing and Electroplankton

When is a game not a game? Because it's software designed to run on the Nintendo DS, Electroplankton and Animal Crossing: Wild World are packaged and sold as traditional games. Despite that, they don't have many of the elements we normally associate with games; Electroplankton has no measure of progress, and Animal Crossing is more Sims than SimCity. Neither of them have a win condition. While they may not be your normal Friday night rental, both of them are potent tools for having fun. Read on for my impressions of these distinctly different titles.

• Title: Animal Crossing: Wild World
• Developer/Publisher: Nintendo
• System:DS

Most games present you with clear goals, give you the means to complete your objectives, and set you loose. In good games these short-term achievable mileposts are accomplished in entertaining ways. What separates game activities from real life tasks is the entertainment value; If being a file clerk had a snappy tune and involved matching colourful patterns, it would probably be a more enjoyable position. Animal Crossing blurs the line between entertainment and some of the boring parts of real life. Through your little virtual avatar you work for a living, maintain social contacts, and live without save points if you screw something up. How does a game where you have to pay off a mortgage end up being fun?

Every player who starts a game of Animal Crossing is actually creating a miniature world. By answering some simple questions on a cab ride into town, you establish your identity and your little avatar's personality. Dropped into the town in front of the establishment of one Tom Nook, you're immersed into a reality that exists just for you. If you asked me to describe to you what you 'do' in Animal Crossing the answer would be something like this: "The player works to get out of debt to real estate tycoon (and raccoon) Tom Nook by performing odd jobs for the town's citizenry." Jobs include fossil hunting, bug catching, and fishing; All of them are accomplished through simple mini-games.

That's what you do, but that simple description belies the reason you'll want to play Animal Crossing. The mortgage hanging over your head is a very kind one. No one will break your kneecaps if you don't spend your every minute working towards a debt-free life. As such, you're free to explore the world you've created. Complete with a 24-hour clock that matches day and night cycles to the real world, Animal Crossing is a place you'll want to visit for a number of reasons.

In my town (Madison), the humorous animal citizenry were a huge draw. Besides the owl running the museum, Polly the Postmaster, and anti-RIAA music-dog K.K. Slider, my neighbors included a big jovial bear, a scatterbrained kitty, and a surly penguin. Each of them had very different personalities, with their own tastes and hobbies. The penguin liked to go bug collecting at night, for example, while the kitty was always camped out by my house with a fishing pole. Even while you consciously understand these are just figments of your handheld console's imagination, you can't help to connect with their goofy avatars. I honestly found myself wanting to make sure they were cared for. We'd send letters back and forth, often giving each other little presents that would help us personalize our homes.

The customization element in Animal Crossing is another draw. You can design T-shirts for your little avatar to wear, collect furniture and ornamental pieces to spruce up your home, and make deals with Tom Nook to expand your floorspace once you''re completely out of room. Shops only sell a given selection of items every day, and so you'll find yourself coming back to the game for short sessions every day. A typical play session will see you hopping on to check Nook's for a piece of furniture, running a quick fossil digging sweep for Blathers the museum owl, and returning some correspondence to a well-wishing neighbor.

Therein lies the fun. Instead of boxing you in with quests or time tests, Nintendo gives you the chance to live in a fully realized place. The longer you're in a town, the bigger impact you'll make. Fossil turn-ins will improve the museum, chores done for neighbors lead to civic improvements; Play long enough and you'll see some friendly faces move on to other towns and new animal-folks move in to take their place. Via an online component you can even visit the towns of friends, meeting their animal buddies and checking out what they've done for their community. Overall the online element is underwhelming, though. The joy of this game lies in being a member of a tiny, cute, furry community.

Animal Crossing is not for everyone. Even folks who played the original title on the Gamecube may not appreciate the re-envisioned Crossing; the collectable NES games are missing here, for example. If you can get past the seemingly absurd nature of the game, you'll find a kind of calm warmth can be had from participating in this goofy little neighborhood simulation. The portability of the DS makes interacting with your town during a spare twenty minutes an ideal way to play. That bus trip or waiting room interval is just long enough to make a few bells, file a mortgage payment, and send a dirty letter to your next-door neighbor. I loved it. It has everything that the usual gaming experience doesn't offer. Animal Crossing is all about community as a reflection, and in the commitment you make to some tiny animal buddies you may just find out something new about yourself.

• Title: Electroplankton
• Developer/Publisher: Nintendo
• System:DS

Where Animal Crossing pushes the boundaries of what can be considered a game, Electroplankton leaps them easily. You're left wondering where exactly you've found yourself. Consisting entirely of interfaces you can use to manipulate musical elements, Electroplankton is as much a game as a guitar or a keyboard. The fact that it happens to be on the Nintendo DS means that a lot of gamers are going to end up encountering it at some point, poking at the swimming plankton in amusement and confusion.

This unique offering from Nintendo is a new way to experience music. There are several different types of music-making tools, referred to as plankton. Each plankton is a type of tiny 'living' creature that makes sounds as it moves about the world. The sounds are greatly varied in nature, and travel the gamut from remarkable recreations of instrument noises to digitized version of sounds that the players makes into the DS microphone. Making music is a matter of manipulating the plankton in new and different ways. The Hanenbow creatures are probably my favorite. They're launched from a small leaf-tube at a plant. The plant itself can be in various shapes, and each of the leaves on the plant can be oriented in 360 degrees of movement. When a Hanenbow plankton strikes a leaf, the chord is not unlike a harp being plucked. When it strikes a leaf, it ricochets off of the surface and (if other leaves are oriented to catch it) can continue to sound notes as it bounces from surface to surface. By orienting leaves appropriately beautiful melodies can be created. The Electroplankton site (flash) has flash movies of the Hanenbow and other planktons, and can give you a better idea of what the experience is like.

Some plankton are more one-trick ponies, but most of them have enough variability that you'll enjoy seeing what sort of musical experience you can get out of them. Playing with the plankton is an oddly soothing experience, as you watch the little guys moving about the DS screen while your musical arrangement echoes from the tiny system. There's something very Zen about the act of composing via plankton, a simple quiet that you don't get with more typical games like Mario Kart or Kirby.

The actual experience of play is something that should be experienced at least once. Younger people, who many never have been able to create their own music before, will be awed by the power the simple tools offer. Older players will appreciate the quality of design and the calm the experience exudes. Frustratingly, that moment of peace will not last forever. As sublime a design as Electroplankton offers, the lack of practicality it shows is infuriating. When you wish to return to real life, plankton-less, you'll be disappointed by an inability to save your compositions. There are no goals, no unlockables, nothing to goad a buyer into playing more of the game. It's absolutely nothing like a game at all, and in the United States that tactic is going to lead to lackluster sales. Without the power to save your work, working with Electroplankton is an entirely transitory act.

For me, my time with Electroplankton was introspective and enjoyable. I enjoyed the opportunity to make music, to experience something on a gaming system that wasn't reward-driven or fast-paced. In truth, I hope we see more experiences like Electroplankton in the future. Burnout is a wonderful game series, but gaming for the quiet moments is a worthwhile endeavor as well. That said, this is not a title I'd want to take on the bus and will not be something I'll be glued to months from now. As therapy or Zen-inducing music experience, Electroplankton is without equal. As a game, the title just goes beyond what I'm looking for in a software purchase.

MMORPGs

MMORPGs generally don't have a win condition either.

Re:MMORPGs

You raise a really interesting point, because Animal Crossing also consists of "mini win conditions." Paying off your house to Tom Nook is one, finishing up museums, or visiting friends to get different fruit trees, or collecting the various sets, or making lots of money on the stalk market... They're all ways to "win" in the game.

I suppose the one major difference is that it's a lot easier to see how to "lose" in an MMORPG. You can die, have your stuff stolen, and be in a situation where it's more work than fun to progress. In Animal Crossing, your ability to progress is based on how much time you put into the game -- there's no way to die, and it's quite hard to lose money.

Re:MMORPGs

MMORPGs generally don't have a win condition either.

Not true!

First player to stop playing MMORGs, successfully escape his mother's basement, and get a real girlfriend wins.

Unfortunately, the winners are very few....

Sim City?

"Electroplankton has no measure of progress, and Animal Crossing is more Sims than SimCity. Neither of them have a win condition."

And Sim City does..?

Animal Crossing supports wi-fi

Probably should also be mentioned that animal crossing supports wi-fi. While the game is great without it, it's really nice to be able to pop and see your friend's towns, and trade items with them. If you have a few friends who play the game, it adds a lot, and makes you keep your town super-tidy :)

Re:Animal Crossing supports wi-fi

Which is probably why it was mentioned in the review.

Animal Crossing has always been like that

there is no goal, other than what you provide.

Sometimes, I've gone on a tree-chopping crusade across villages, sometimes I've been a master gardener building a wide variety of fruit trees (and the ever elusive strawberry tree, or cherry tree with its blossoms), sometimes I've been a t-shirt collector, sometimes I've been out for gold making gold trees by burying sacks of 10,000 bells at a time.

Other times I've been a music collector.

Sometimes I've wanted lots of neighbors, so I've planted flowers and weeded everything to look nice - other times I've been a recluse, so I've put pitfall traps in front of my animal neighbors houses and laughed as they fell into them, and planted trees so they can't get out, while destroying all the flowers.

It's like the real world, except noone ever dies, they just move away and leave you to wallow in your pit of despair.

The experience

I think certain game makers are starting to really exploit the idea that a game is about the whole unified experience and not about what you do or how you do it or even what the little pieces look like. It's about a kind of interactive virtual total-immersion. Trying to explain why a game is fun in terms of how you play and what the avatars look like is a bit like claiming poker is a great game because the rules for getting a full house are so simple and the little hearts on the cards are cute.

Atari?

Have you ever played an atari game? More specifically an Atari 2600 game? Apparently they were so low on space, they just excluded optional things, like an ENDING. I mean, even Adventure... it has an end, but it DOESNT EVER END! You just keep running around. And what about Mario Bros. I spent 7 hours once trying to get to an end. I got to level 91 before kicking the damn console with a rage only matched by a scorned woman.

Life like games

Will we have a game like in the movie jumanji?

There's a word for this sort of thing...

It's called a toy, as opposed to a game. While Animal Crossing seems like a very open-ended game, Electroplankton is definitely a toy. It's a neat thing that has certain properties and lets you do stuff, and you can play around with it to see what's possible and what isn't. Given the historical popularity of physical toys, it doesn't seem that surprising that virtual ones are gaining ground.

you just wait and see

Neither of them have a win condition.

No win condition?

No win condition?

Well you just wait and see; Tom Nook's head will hang upon my wall.... Oh yes, it will.

Nooooooooook!!!!

Need a port of SimTunes...

ElectroPlankton was by the same guy who wrote "Musical Insects" at the San Franscisco Exploratorium, which got redone by Maxis, called "SimTunes"...
here's a Wired article about the artist [wired.com] and here's a review of the software [wired.com].

SimTunes was a paintprogram of sorts, except the canvas was transversed by 4 bugs, each could be mapped to a different instrument. Each color then would make the bug play a different note or sound effect, and there were also square modifiers to change the direction or motion of the bug.

It still had a sense of playfulness, you could just focus on making pretty pictures, but could be used as a semi-serious sequencing tool...unlike ElectroPlankton, pretty much any tune could be ported to it, plus there were some interesting tools like limiting the color pallete to a certain scale...

anyway, SimTunes only "kind of" installs these days and runs poorly. I'd love to see a port of it to a game console or better yet as some kind of web app (with a way of SAVING results, unlike Electroplankton...)

Tom Nook is a Crook

He won't break your legs? I was under a different impression [vgcats.com]!

Win conditions

To some extent, I can see the argument of a lack of a win condition applied to the classic arcade games (Galaga being my current favorite). The sole point of playing these games is to continue playing them, at least in their modern incarnations where high scores tend not to be persistant or viewed by anyone but the sole proprieter of the game. Who cares if you've got the record high score if you're the only one playing? Yet we play anyway, more out of a sense of zen fulfillment than anything else.

Hmm... the path to enlightenment as revealed through video games... there may be something to that...

great review...

these are my two favorite "games" for the DS, nice overview.

Games are games.

Just because they're unconventional doesn't mean they aren't games. There are countless games that lack win conditions or a measure of progress in the traditional sense.

At the most basic level a game is played for some kind of emotional feedback triggered by the player's actions, ideally it's positive feedback, usually as stress relief or as an escape I suppose.

Those DS games are great, but let's not blow things out of proportion here.

A better question is...

When is a sim or puzzle not a game? Last I checked, a "game" wasn't required to have an ending or have you earning points. Something is a game if it is fun (although that is arguable with some of the bad "games" we have all played). The only condition in which a game isn't a game in the traditional sense if it is used for some sort of training, which I'm quite sure these games most definitely aren't.... Sure, there are probably a zillion definitions of what a game is that are quite different then mine, and many will probably argue with my definition, but all in all, I think fun is the only requirement.

No furries pls

The joy of this game lies in being a member of a tiny, cute, furry community.

Not in public, please.

Animal Crossing is great for non gamers

My wife is about as non-gamer as you can get. Well, I bought Animal Crossing for the Gamecube a few years back. She played it for months, eventually losing interest of course, but still for someone that did not usually play games this was quite a feat. I would highly recommend Animal Crossing or Animal Crossing Wild World for anyone that is not traditionally into games. As for Nintendo, I applaud them for this and other attempts at pushing the envelope and can only hope this goes on into the future. There should be more games like this. Not everyone wants the next GTA or Halo.

Mix a little fantasy and reality

Make the game a reflection of your *real* life.. where it's bank account is your *real* bank account... and when it's paying bills it's REALLY paying bills... ;) and you can compete with other people as to who has the most efficiently managed life for incentive.

Who knows.. if people showed the same dedication to RL as they did their avatars, our world might actually improve a little!

Saving music

I thought I found the link on Slashdot, but perhaps not. A Nintendo rep recently explained [nintendo.com] a way to save your compositions to your PC (bit of a hack, but seems to work).

From the link:
For a very simplistic way of saving your compositions to your computer, get a male-male 1/8" audio cable ($3-$4 at your local electronics store). Plug one end into the DS headphone jack and the other into your PC's mic input. Then use a program such as Sound Recorder to capture the audio. Or research sound capture on the Intrynet using a search engine.

The future of applications...

A lot of people have to do relatively boring jobs which are now done in front of a screen. At least in the past there was limited activity involved - real interaction with fellow workers, handling real files and physical books.
Douglas Adams kind of predicted what I'm presenting here, but I think he had a point. This is the idea that eventually game technology will merge with business applications to produce "skins" around the applications that fit into a virtual world. For instance, doing your accounts (or even online banking...) will give you the option of doing it via metaphors ranging from the present field/dropdown/button to an immersive virtual reality in which you enter a virtual bank and interact with a virtual teller.
Why are we going to need this? Because otherwise what are the majority of people going to do for the rest of their lives? As the other well known Adams- Scott - has pointed out, the few interesting jobs going will gradually reduce in number and become available only to the most intelligent. Pulling in a third dystopian futurologist, Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World he speculated that many jobs would specifically not be automated to provide work for everyone. That works in a world with a small population, but not in ours. We need plenty of work for middle rank people that does not involve large expenditure of resources.

Virtual reality applications could address some of this. You can imagine a virtual reality in which the underlying messaging is pure business, but the metaphors are different at each end. The buyer may interact with the seller with the buyer using the metaphor of a marauding Viking and the seller using the metaphor of a bazaar in a Middle Eastern country, but the messaging will do the translation. When people get bored with their jobs they will change the metaphor or go to a company doing similar work but with a different corporate virtual world.

The main problem (and opportunity) with this as a concept is that the US way of doing business is to try to make the rest of the world behave like Americans. But the Chinese, the Indians and newly emerging trading states like Dubai won't wear this. Virtual reality metaphors could help facilitate world trade.

Also, by making it possible for people to do business in an interesting way while staying at home, they could significantly reduce world energy demands.

Any venture capitalists out there with a few spare billions and the urge to fund the next dotcom bubble - just post a reply and perhaps I'll get back to you. Or not.

Animal Crossing Online

If you are looking for a place to find people who play Animal Crossing online I recommend WiTendoFi.com [witendofi.com]. They have tools for sharing information in AC that are rather cool (like Turnip Watch [witendofi.com]).

Hope you see you there.

nintendogs

isn't Nintendogs another game that hasn't got a precise goal?

animal crossing is great for kids

Two of my kids, ages 7 and 9 (girl and boy) are absolutely addicted to Animal Crossing. They never have really gotten in to any of the more "action" oriented games that we have bought (Tak...which is very cool, and one of the Harry Potter titles...which was lame). They were kind of cool to Animal Crossing at first...but recently they have started playing it a couple of hours a day.

I don't know if it is related, but both of them are high functioning autistic, and I think the "life" in the game with it's very simple and clear set of rules is very appealing to them.

They also love Pikmin, but not like Animal Crossing.

I've also been wanting them to try Harvest Moon: It's a Wonderful Life. And Chibi-Robo.

The ASPCA should investigate Animal Crossing!

I'm petitioning the ASPCA to investigate Nintendo's Animal Crossing for creating conditions that lead to virtual animal negligence and other cruelty. I am not directly referring to the animals in Animal Crossing as I seem to think that they are capable of taking care of themselves.

Unfortunately, the time that one must devote to gathering bells to pay off loans to that cursed raccoon causes the poor pups in Nintendogs to languish around the virtual house waiting for their owner to return to feed them, bathe them, and take them for walks. Yes, many 'dogs status are currently parched, famished, and filthy.

Won't someone please think of the Nintendogs?

Electroplankton a game and an artwork

Caveat, the author is a friend of mine. Toshio Iwai is a well known digital media artist who has done a number of works in which you compose music in one way or another, often using some kind of objects you can manipulate. Sometimes as simiple as a bouncy bal, other times you are herding a fleet of lights bouncing musically through a matrix like sound fireworks. So some of the things in the game are evolutions of some of his works. For example the donut spinners.. in recent years he has worked with displays projected from above onto a white table or in this case a white turntable.. you spin the turntable with your hand and something like a donut in the game appears. These displays are neat because you can make virtual controls sensed from above or below, giving an interesting non-crt tactile feel. Anyway, I also wanted to save things I made but it seems this may have been an artistic decision.. or possibly a technical limitation. One thing you may like to know is that at the Electroplankton launch in La Foret hall in Harajuku, Tokyo, the president of Nintendo came and gave a talk with Iwai and said the DS was made to a musical and interactive specifications so that it could play Electroplankton. There is also a wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] about it. Incidentally a FAQ [gamefaqs.com] at gamefaqs says it is not a game because "Electroplankton has no measurable objective; you can't 'complete', 'finish', 'win' or 'succeed' at playing it." However I got a massive amount of enjoyment out of it and electroplankton is the necessary and sufficient reason I'd have for buying a DS, I think this definition of game and need to fit into even one's idea of what will sell is unneccessary. For example I went to XBOX Live! which is a large bar lounge Microsoft set up in Omotesando, Tokyo (near La Foret) and tried a couple games for the XBOX in particular one where you direct armies to fight each other and you have magical berserker powers. Without instructions I found it initially interesting but so hard to win, so shallow, and so painful on the fingers that after 30 games or so I just gave up and never want to look at the place again. For me anyway Electroplankton beats that "showcase game" hands down.. a different audience perhaps. I'd rather thank Nintendo for doing it and hope it sells enough for them to make more like it! P.S. also it beats hands down the Fly Pen I got my nephews for Christmas, by about 100x. It would be worth it to figure out how to hook up an amp to it and record to a pc.. heck worth buying a DS for them too I think. And better for their brains than yet another Harry Potter adventure though they love those too.

Garden SImulator

Our (free) Garden Simulator is also intended as an an open ended toy.
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/gwi.htm [kurtz-fernhout.com]
Doesn't suceed at that as much as we hoped, in part as we tossed too many of the fun aspects (neighbors, food preservation, survival aspects, etc.) in the interests of finishing version 1.0.

Our PlantStudio software which tries to do less ends up succeeding more at that (where just designing your own plants can be a lot of fun).
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/ [kurtz-fernhout.com]

Seymour Papert called these things "Microworlds" and was a big inspiration for us,
    http://www.papert.org/ [papert.org]
"People laughed at Seymour Papert in the sixties when he talked about children using computers as instruments for learning and for enhancing creativity. The idea of an inexpensive personal computer was then science fiction. But Papert was conducting serious research in his capacity as a professor at MIT. This research led to many firsts. It was in his laboratory that children first had the chance to use the computer to write and to make graphics. The Logo programming language was created there, as were the first children's toys with built-in computation. ..."

For young kids though (under five to seven?), just playing with physical toys and doing physical activities and being in a physical neighborhood seems like a better idea than spending too much time at the screen. I think it has a lot to do with how children are wired to learn best. See for example:
    http://www.alternative-doctor.com/home_page_articl es/vid-kids.html [alternative-doctor.com]
"In addition to the physical perils of too much screen, educators and other experts believe the TV and computer games take children away from the time that otherwise would be spent on developing their imaginations and social skills through peer play, socialization and hands-on creativity."

I still think computer microworlds be useful and positive; it's more a question of moderation and how they fit into a child's overall entire experience (especially later in life, after age five or so). We also found out that people learn more creating their own simulations than using someone else's.

"Extreme Animal Crossing"

I was hoping for "Extreme Animal Crossing" http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=167989&c id=14008510 [slashdot.org]

Re:When is an gaming editor not a gaming editor?

Well, we are talking about Zonk; who redefines "editor" in general and "gaming editor" in particular in his own... umm... special way.