Here's an idea, Animal Crossing preaches otaku Citizenship.
So for the longest time, Animal Crossing
was on what my friend Matt calls a "Lucille List,"
things that I do not understand and won't respond to.
I thought Animal Crossing was a boring, simplistic, silly game
for kids and I was wrong.
So for the uninitiated, in the new AC game
called New Leaf you arrive in a small country town
and are immediately made mayor.
I know, I know, it sounds really irresponsible.
You don't know the political climate
or any of the social issues, but you just, you go with it.
I mean, they're animals so it's a little bit easier
than in real life.
Right of the bat you set to the task of meeting everybody
and using your mayoral powers to turn
this bucolic but boring homestead into a bustling,
well managed, mini metropolis.
The central mechanics of the game
require that you maintain friendships
with all of the townspeople by just saying hi and doing
small favors, and acquire local, natural resources, which
you can sell to a merchant or donate
to the museum which is run by an owl named Blathers.
The game frames and rewards these actions
as the deeds of a good neighbor and an invested mayor,
and along the way inspires what I would call
a kind of otaku citizenship.
So what does that mean?
I'll explain, but let's make sure we're
on the same page about what otaku even is.
Meaning literally "you" in Japanese,
otaku has come to name a group of people
who are very passionate about a particular piece of media
or hobby.
In the states, we associate otaku
with obsessive fans of Japanese culture and anime,
but you can be an otaku for pretty much anything.
You can be a history otaku, a baseball otaku,
and if you want to get nuts, let's
get nuts and talk about otaku otaku.
And while it can be a stand-in for the word geek,
the two are not strictly isomorphic.
For instance, otaku tend to exhibit
a completionist zeal for consumption and collection
not found in a lot of geekdom.
They must have and know and see and hear
all of the things related to their obsession.
For media otaku specifically, this intense involvement
isn't necessarily inspired by any thematic significance.
Like an identification with the message
that true love is the secret to happiness or technology
will inevitably contribute to a largely complex, unfair class
structure.
Rather, otaku can become infatuated
with certain characters or objects
independent of any actual relationship
with preexisting stories or narrative elements.
So like an Ayanami Rei figurine or fan fiction or coaster set
or dustpan might not have anything
to do with the narrative of Neon Genesis Evangelion,
but because it references Neon Genesis Evangelion universe
in some way it is worth having.
Both the object and the act of collection
itself becomes the source of air punching celebratory
excitement.
In his book "Otaku," Japanese database animals
scholar Azuma Hiroki describes Evangelion and by extension
other are otaku friendly media as an aggregate information
without narrative into which all viewers could
empathize of their own accord.
This is otaku.
It is not unquestioning fan devotion or collection
for collection sake, it is somewhere between.
It should also be said that casting
the entirety of otaku culture as geeks
who like to collect things is incredibly reductive,
and if we had time to draw more parallels we would,
but we don't, so sad face.
So what in the world does this have
to do with Animal Crossing and citizenship?
Glad you asked.
Essentially, the point of Animal Crossing
is involvement and collection in the absence of narrative.
Players work very hard to collect art, bugs, fish,
fossils, and fruit from their towns.
They can donate everything to the local museum
to survey the mammoth collection of awesome things
that they have gathered.
Or they can sell it off and get them bells, son.
And bells can be spent on public works projects like bridges
or cafes or ordinances like Beautiful Town, which
really at their heart are just as much about collection
and display as the museum is.
And no one does any of this stuff
because it advances the plot, there
is no plot, no narrative, just objects,
just aggregate information.
Players collect bugs and fossils and buildings
because they are neat and cute and the act of collection
itself is super fun.
For example, in my town of Sysagy,
I have a pretty solid reputation as a fishing fiend, which
is really just an in-game way of saying I collect a lot of fish.
Players also collect stuff-- and this
is the big one-- because the townspeople expect them to.
Animal Crossing New Leaf asks that you
be a perfectly otaku mayor because it
makes the town a better place.
Beyond the fact that many townspeople are
an homage to some very otaku friendly characteristics,
they also hold you to a kind of otaku code
of honor or citizenship.
You're going to collect all of the things, so why not
learn from them, and of course respect them in the process,
and then display your collection for other people to appreciate
and also learn from?
Or invest it all back into the place
that allowed you to start collecting in the first place.
Collect kind and funny friends, not problem citizens
in the process.
Collect social interactions and experiences.
Take snapshots.
This is how Animal Crossings otaku
is different from say, Pokemon.
I mean sure, there is the gotta catch
them all mentality of finding all
of the cool stuff for your Animal Crossing crib,
but in Animal Crossing there is no limited set of things
which you must acquire.
There is no ending to the story.
And it's not really about your progression as a character.
The focus really is on your town.
There is a citizen satisfaction survey for pete's sake,
letting you know how well you're doing collecting
all of the improvements.
Imagine now for a moment that the real government were
run the way it is in Animal Crossing by otaku citizens.
Yes, your AC town is a miniature bourgeois hamlet
where most people don't work and spend
the days wandering around watering flowers
and asking what their new catch phrase should
be, but the political climate and social issues
that you didn't know a thing about when you first arrived,
maybe not even a thing.
There is more important collecting and displaying work
at hand.
Focused entirely on developing infrastructure and maintaining
relationships, government starts to look
a little different, I mean, other than the fact
that it's sort of run by a dog in a dress.
And does this mean the kids growing up
playing New Leaf will think differently about government?
Maybe.
At the very least, there'd be more government support
for planting fruit and spending days at the beach.
What do you guys think?
Does Animal Crossing preach otaku citizenship and can
those values have a practical use?
Let us know in the comments.
And I'll give you one guess about what we're collecting.
It's action figures of every subscriber, actually.
Is it just me, or did that discussion get a little heated?
Let's see what you guys had to say about climate change.
Paulakise, akkronym48, and a bunch of other people
said that while the discovery of climate change
is a great achievement, it has the potential
of being dwarfed by whatever the outcome of that discovery is.
Let's all just hope that it's a positive outcome.
Relatedly, Stormin Norman says that the real achievement
is the fact that we were able to industrialize in such a way
that we caused climate change to happen.
Yeah, I guess that's a kind of achievement.
To The3ddfan and anyone else concerned
with the very premise of this video,
we were not interested in getting involved
in the very thorny debate about whether
or not climate change is real, but rather if it is real
whether or not it is deserving of a certain kind of respect.
We do not mean to call into question anybody's beliefs
about whether or not climate change is true or caused
by people, rather we wanted to approach a very specific topic
critically.
And I think that this is a really important task
in critical thinking, a really important tool,
to be able to hold onto an idea that you do not necessarily
believe in in order to see where it's logical conclusion goes.
Whether or not starting at that sort of two steps
end point was irresponsible of us, I don't think so,
some other people clearly do.
DavidPetrucci524 says that our greatest scientific achievement
actually is the discovery of fire.
Which actually I wonder whether or not the discovery of fire
counts as science.
Which that might just be like asking whether or not
cave paintings count as art, but I think
it's an interesting question.
DJFrenAMe and TaveTheThrasher say
that putting a man on the moon and evolutionary theory
respectively are our greatest scientific achievements
for the same reason that we said that the discovery of climate
change is a great scientific achievement, that they were all
of these systems that came together to make
those discoveries happen.
Which is a very fair point.
Finally, Sarah Brewer brings up some really interesting points
about maybe the myth of objectivity
in the sciences, which is a thing I've been
doing a lot of reading about.
It's very interesting.
We'll put a small reading list in the description
here if you're interested.
This week's episode was brought you
by the tireless work of these very tired individuals
with a special shout out to Joe Hansen
from It's Okay to be Smart for fielding
some of my sciencey questions.
This week's Tweet of the week comes
from Sam Thomas who points us toward a Tom Bacon
video about communicating with the future
about ecological disasters.
It is sobering.