Game Theory - The Animals in Animal Crossing Aren't Animals! (Animal Crossing: New Horizons)

Episode Date: April 30, 2023

Animal Crossing is PEOPLE! No, really! Theorists, this may be one of the most unexpected theories I've put out recently, but once you see it, you will never unsee it. I have gathered TONS of evidence that our player character is only SEEING the villagers of Animal Crossing as animals. They are not, in fact, ACTUAL talking, anthropomorphic animals. Have I said the word animals enough yet? Well get ready Loyal Theorists, I am about to blow your mind! Animals!

No man is an island and tire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. Each man's death diminishes me, or I am involved in mankind. Therefore, it's not to know for whom the bill tolls. It tolls for thee. Miao. Bells? Did someone say, bills? Here's a bell toll for you.

Hello, internet. Welcome to Game Theory. Literally the only show you will ever see that's a to get away with inserting a John Dunn poem into an online video about Animal Crossing. Two months in and I am still doing my daily chores. Are you? Picking weeds is just therapeutic, dang it! But beyond the thrill of catching tarantulas, the thing that's most exciting about this game is how the current world situation has changed the way that it's being played. A company in Singapore made their own branded island getaway to lure in Animal Crossing tourists.

The Getty Museum has made their collection of classic artwork available for you to download and print right now so it can be displayed in your own home. Now, you too can hang a $54 million Vincent Van Gogh painting right next to your toilet corner. My favorite though has gotta be the Monterey Bay Aquarium which recreated itself in the game and is giving real tours. Anyway, today's theory isn't about any of that. It's about something much more serious and much darker.

Today's theory takes a stake and drives it into the beating heart at the center of Animal Crossing. Because you see, I don't think this game is exactly what it appears to be. I think there's a tragic truth that's bubbling under the surface of happy-go-lucky animals and ridiculously sized orefish. So here I am taking a late-night stroll. A virtual late-night stroll, of course. I don't stroll much in real life. Mostly just sludge from the couch over to the kitchen and then back to the couch. So anyway, there I am just strolling along through the city center, enjoying the relaxing music, the serene sights,

when suddenly an owl perched atop the community board. It wasn't Blathers, the refined museum curator, I would recognize him and his irrational insect hatred anywhere. It wasn't Celeste, his sister, the astrologist either. No, this owl was different. It didn't speak, it didn't interact, it didn't even walk. It flew like an owl, a real owl. And when I looked into its beady little eyes, I didn't see the burden of sentience and mortal awareness. This owl was just instinct and animalistic reactions. When I stepped forward to get a closer look, it flew off into the night, gone as suddenly as it had arrived. But it got me thinking about all kinds of things. Things that I'd never really stopped and questioned before. Blathers, Celeste, Cousteau, croak, twiggy, I mean, they're all animals. That is the name of in the game, animal crossing, but they talk. They walk on two legs, like my human character in the game. But the owl in the square, the frogs that you catch in the lake, the yellow birds that appeared in previous games, I mean, they're all animals too, but they're different. They behave like normal animals. They run on instinct. They don't talk. They don't live and work in the village. There are also

fish and turtles in the water, butterflies fluttering through the air, bugs crawling through the flowers, and yet here's an owl, and here's an owl. There are hamsters that you keep in pets and cages, and hamsters that walk around your town and talk like humans. What does it all mean? Well, after doing some digging, I believe that this is our first and most obvious clue that Animal Crossing isn't just a story about living in a cute village, fishing, protesting the local aquariums, and sometimes having to watch out for the murderous Easter Bunny that's hiding over in the bushes. No! I believe that our character in Animal Crossing is surrounded by real human beings.

Blathers, Tom Nook, Isabel, all of them. They're all humans. They're all real people that we are just seeing as animals. That is why we're also able to see real frogs, real owls and fish and birds alongside these more humanoid ones. But how? Why? Well, I think it's the end result of our characters rare and very unusual mental illness. So strap in loyal theorists and prepare to go down a Hopkins rabbit hole with me that your pleasant memories from this game won't soon recover from. What we're talking about today is the incredibly rare and very unusual condition known as clinical lycanthropy. Not to be confused with normal lycanthropy, which is someone just turning into a wolf. Yeah, it's a werewolf syndrome Also not to be confused with another rare werewolf syndrome called hypertricosis, which causes excessive hair growth all over your body

Making people look like Michael J. Fox from teen wolf. No, clinical lycanthropy is Quote an unusual belief or delusion in which the patient thinks that he or she has been transformed into an animal And quote. But clearly our character isn't the animal and animal crossing, right? It's literally everyone else around our character. Well, that's why there is lycanthropic intermetamorphosis, which has the sufferer see someone else or even a group of people as being transformed into some type of animal. Now you can start seeing why this theory might work. Clinical lycanthropy is so rare that it's tough to find a specific number of how many cases there have been diagnosed. An article on live science.com reported that since 1850, there have been

56 original case descriptions of people who believe that they were indeed, Metamorphosing into an animal. Now, I know what you're thinking. Sure, you have villagers like chief, Fang, Kyle, Wolfgang, all of which are obviously wolves, but there's way more types of animals present in our village. Why would a werewolf-related syndrome apply to them? Well, it's important to note that while lichanthropic intermetamorphosis is named after turning into a werewolf, the actual condition results in patients seeing all sorts of different animals. A 2004 review of medical literature lists over 30 published paces of lycanthropy with only a few of them having a dog or wolf theme. Other animals that tended to pop up included cats, horses, birds, tigers, frogs, and foxes. And those are just the animals that appear in Animal Crossing. Real life patients also either saw or felt themselves transforming into non-gain creatures like bees, hyenas, snakes. So already you can see how this is not only a real condition someone can have and how they can see other people as animals, but also how it's entirely possible that's they see the huge variety of animal types we see present throughout the Animal Crossing games.

In fact, in one specific case from 2009, the patient believed that his father had changed into a boar and was attacking him, his brother had changed to a horse and sometimes kicked him, and his mother changed into a donkey, and he even heard her braying. So as you can tell, the cases that are reported are pretty wild. In one, a 24-year-old male believed that he was a cat trapped inside of a human body for 13 years, stating that he had known that was a cat since the secret had been imparted to him by the family cat that he grew up with, who subsequently taught him the secret cat language. In his free time, he lived with cats, he hunted with cats, he frequented cat night spots, which is a direct quote from the research paper I read, and I can't even imagine what that means. Went to like dumpsters at night, the milk bar,

if cats the movie taught me anything. He had a crush on the tigris in the local zoo, who he hoped to one day release from her captivity. In another lecanthropy story, you remember the the face-eating guy from Florida? Uh, no, actually, the other face-eating guy down in Florida. Wow, there's more than one, which tells me there are far too many face-eating incidents happening down in Florida. Anyway, the one I'm talking about happened pretty recently in March of 2019 when a man suffering from clinical lycanthropy delusions was accused of murdering a couple and then chewing on the face of one of his victims. In this case, the man believed that he was half dog, half man. But okay, obviously there's not a whole lot of face eating going to

on in the world of Animal Crossing. And sure, we have some normal animals who are scurrying around the world that force us to ask some very serious questions about the humanoid ones that we see walking around on two legs, but what else can I point to to try and support this very wacky theory? Well, let's start with how this disorder might develop in the first place. What causes it? Are certain people more likely to deal with clinical lycanthropy than others? Well, most doctors believe that clinical lycanthropy is linked to schizophrenia or mood disorders

like bipolar disorder. In fact, many doctors don't even classify clinical lycanthropy as its own syndrome and prefer to diagnose it as a symptom of other serious psychological conditions. And as with all mood disorders, there's gonna be a lot of different variables that can possibly trigger them. Family history, age, a sudden stressful event. In one documented case of clinical lycanthropy, doctors believe the man's condition was triggered by taking the drug ecstasy. He reported never having psychiatric problems in the past, and then all of a sudden, his family is just a bunch of barnyard animals. Talk about a don't-do drugs lesson there, kiddos. Pretty safe to say our villager ain't going out to any late-night raves,

but he did recently undergo major life events and a number of stressful situations. Moving out, living alone, being in debt, those are extremely stressful life events. And if our character is a young adult, which we can probably assume based on their appearance and the letters that they're getting from mom at home, they're at a high risk for the onset of mental disorders. A study of 12 known cases of lycanthropy from the McLean Hospital put the average age of onset at 25, with the youngest cases occurring at age 16 and the oldest at age 38. Most were taking place in the late teens and mid-20s, which is exactly where our animal crossing character would be.

So we have our character in a vulnerable age, plus extreme stressors, plus the general lack of any kind of support group, because let's face it, you're spending far more time in this game supporting all the other residents than they're doing supporting you, and bam, you've got yourself a recipe for a mental breakdown. Sure, 99.99% of us make it through adulting, without wanting to groom our neighbors main or pluck our postal workers' feathers, but it is a possibility.

Likanthropy is rare, certainly super, super rare, one of the rarest diagnoses out there, but it might just be the thing that rationalizes the details that we're seeing in this game world. So, do the other symptoms line up? Well, since the cases are few and far between, there's not one concrete list of how a doctor might diagnose this condition, but outside of, you know, seeing people as animals, there are common symptoms in firsthand accounts,

that we can use to guide our diagnosis. For instance, disorganized speech. In instances of clinical lycanthropy with disorganized speech symptoms, the patient often has trouble understanding words, or their hearing sounds of the animals that they believe that they're dealing with. And wouldn't you know it, we see both of these traits exactly

in the way that other characters around us are communicating. Though the animals speak English, or whatever, here games native languages, ducks have quacko catch phrases. Mice might say eeks or squeaky. The relevant animal phrases are mixed into whatever we hear them saying. And that's not all. Remember, I said that patients with this condition sometimes have trouble understanding words. And though the captions in the

game for the conversations are in English, the words that come out of the animal's mouths, what we actually are hearing, are almost impossible to understand. It's almost like it's a different language. It's disorganized speech. In a number of these cases, patients reportedly perceived changes to their own physical appearance. Some thought that their mouths and teeth had changed shape or their chests had gotten broader. Some experienced their body shrinking. If you simply walk up to a mirror in Animal Crossing,

you can change virtually everything about your character's appearance in a matter of seconds. Hair color, skin color, eyes, clothing, it takes no time at all. And the fact that the other creatures in town only ever change clothes makes it obvious that you're the only person in town who can change your entire physical appearance with the blink of an eye. Even weirder is the fact that no one comments on your new look.

I don't know if that's true actually. Uh, I don't, I don't know. So if anyone can beg to differ with me on that one, but I'm assuming that if you make your eyes a different color or change, I doubt anyone's saying like, hey, weren't your eyes a different color? There's also an interesting cultural examination to be made, given the way the resident personalities seem to align with the animals that are villagers sees them as. Blathers the owl is wise and knowledgeable,

just like we see owls portrayed in popular culture. Red the fox is sliard. sly and conniving. The raccoons are resourceful and stingy. Animals in the game often have personalities that line up with traditional human notions of what those animals should be like. Not like what those animals really are. This kind of cultural association is thought to be why sufferers of clinical lecanthropy are able to define so specifically which animals they are transforming into or which animals they imagine their landlord or favorite neighbor might become. It's less about becoming a real animal and more about becoming what us humans perceive those animals are supposed to be like. A lion isn't really noble or regal in real life. We humans just assign those traits to them. That's why the stubborn mother appears as a donkey, or the angry, aggressive father becomes a boar. And it's exactly what happens in Animal Crossing. The normal owls are just that. They're birds, owls flying around. But the human that we're perceiving as an owl just so happens to be the town's wise know-it-all, who works in a museum.

Our character's psychology is assigning the animals to the piece, who best match them in the world around us. Lastly, remember that man who developed clinical lycanthropy after taking drugs? Well, he not only believed his family had turned into animals, he also said that his soul sometimes left his body and went to various places with these animals and found what others do in their houses. Does that sound familiar?

In the game, we are able to walk into other villagers' homes and watch what they do, whether we interact with them or not. We can lie in their beds, we can look in their wardrobes, we can observe them with no repercussions, with no repercussions. Seems like something they'd probably want to comment on if, you know, we were actually there doing any of those things. This same man also stated that there was a quote, Angel protecting him, and that he could hear some people talking to him about his daily activities. Every morning on Animal Crossing starts with a declaration of the day's activities from Isabel,

and talking to just about any villager in the game means that they're gonna comment on you and how you're choosing to spend your day. As far as having an angel protecting them, well, what do you call us, the player, the person who is literally controlling that individual's life, ensuring that they're guided the right, or sometimes even the wrong way, or, you know, just ignoring everything else in the world and fishing for 200 hours of total playtime. Long story short, we are complicit in this. We are feeding into this character's psychosis. When asked about the role mental illness played in the game Hellblade Sinoa's sacrifice, Ninja Theory's founder said this, quote, first and foremost, it was about creating a compelling adult fantasy game, but the deeper we've gone

into development, the more we've seen that there's also an opportunity to raise awareness of psychosis. For my part, I've learned that people can experience hallucinations and delusional beliefs without it being a problem. The illness comes when those experiences cause suffering. Often the recovery isn't about curing yourself of hallucinations, but finding ways to live with them. That was a revelation to me." End quote. Video games have long been at the forefront of pushing the traditional limits of storytelling and exploring new adventures and challenges of all kinds.

Representations of mental disorders, especially rare ones, are another way to do exactly that. Do I believe that that was the intention of Animal Crossing? No, certainly not. I do think it's weird that you can catch and sell frogs in the wild to larger humanoid frogs, and I think the quote of, I caught a frog, or it's a new neighbor and I have some apologizing to do, is yet another piece of evidence for the theory showing how our character struggles with the differences between what is and isn't an animal, but whatever! I do think it's all just for fun. That said, in their most simplistic form, video games are a means of escape. They allow us to put aside our daily worries for an hour or two or five or 200 hours of fishing and throw ourselves into a world where we can just release tension, have some fun, and worry about things that don't really matter. It's catharsis in action and it's part of the reason why I love the medium of video games.

But they're also incredible learning tools for seeing the world through a new pair of eyes. Playing a game where the main character is nothing like us helps us learn about experiences different than our own. Interactive storytelling can and should be used as a way to better appreciate and understand the world around us. It's a way to inject just a little more empathy into all of our lives, and couldn't we all use a little bit more of that these days? But hey, that's just a theory, a game theory. Thanks for watching.