Nookazon, data miners, and online tools are evolving Animal Crossing’s economy

With hours of extra time on their hands because of social distancing and quarantine, new players to Nintendo’s “Animal Crossing: New Horizons” like Ash Wolf, also known on Twitter as Ninji, have been drawn to the slow, laid-back life simulator that allows them to build idyllic islands, decorate their homes, visit friends and more.

“People are using this as a sort of escape,” Wolf said. “I joked when I first got the game that it was literally the only thing giving me structure in my life.”

But this influx of new users produced an unexpected evolution, recalibrating the game’s serene speed to a fast-paced hustle one player compared to Wall Street.

Animal Crossing isn’t designed for such gameplay — in fact, it purposefully slows players down by design. Yet the game’s community became obsessed with optimization, in the process exploiting features meant to encourage day-by-day progress. Now, they’ve become a dominant part of the audience, finding loopholes or strategies to get rich fast.

So what happens when gamers focused on efficiency collide with a system that isn’t designed for them? For Animal Crossing, it means a shift from a take-life-as-it-comes paradise into a competitive economy. The influx of players has led to a massive trading system and, inadvertently, inflation. Others have made creative new tools to help with earning money and to ease in-game commerce. But these tools feed back into the same issues and even come with their own risks — among them, upsetting the game’s intended natural balance.

How inflation and trading turned the game upside down

It all starts with two things: money and trade. Animal Crossing was never meant to be a get-rich-quick type of game. In fact, the design steers players toward slow, gentle progression, said Jennifer Scheurle, current lead designer at game development studio ArenaNet who previously worked on titles including “Guild Wars 2” and “Objects in Space.”

Jennifer Scheurle’s character sits on a stool in “Animal Crossing: New Horizons.” (Nintendo)

“It puts literal barriers in front of you to make sure you don’t burn through the entire content it provides,” she said. “I think it’s designed to be played slowly and intently and with some sort of mindfulness in mind.”

“Animal Crossing: New Horizons” is a game that progresses in real time. Many of the game’s cycles take a day or more to complete, and there are only a handful of randomly selected items available to purchase each day. If there’s a particular piece of furniture you want, you’ll have to check the store each day and hope you get lucky. But it also creates a system of diminishing returns. While there are a few mechanics that players can grind — like daily goals for Nook Miles, an in-game currency similar to airline mileage — on the whole, the game doesn’t readily reward people who log more playtime.

For longtime fans of the franchise, that relaxed…