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

no man is an island entire of itself each is a piece of the continent a part of the main each man's beth diminishes me but i am involved in mankind therefore to not to know For Whom the Bell Tolls it tolls for thee meow bells did someone say Bill here's a bell toll for you [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] hello Internet welcomes it game theory literally the only show you will ever see that's able to get away with inserting a John Donne poem into an online video about animal crossing I mean that right there my friends is some quality content that is definitely worth subscribing to hint hint nudge nudge the button is right below this video so Animal Crossing two months in and I am still doing my daily chores are you picking weeds is just there up utak 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 fifty four million dollar Vincent van Gogh painting right next to your toilet corner my favorite though has got to 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 or fish 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 the next 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 in 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 sentient sand 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 well Mather's Celeste Cousteau croaked Wiggy I mean they're all animals that is the name of the game Animal Crossing but they stop 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 as 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 an acute 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 you're 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 hypertrichosis 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 but clearly our character isn't the animal in Animal Crossing right it's literally everyone else around our character well that's why there is like anthropic inter metamorphosis which has the sufferer or 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 LiveScience calm 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 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 lycanthropic inner metamorphosis 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 pieces of lycanthropy but 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 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 break 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 he 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 key 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 the milk bar if cats the movie taught me anything he had a crush on the tigress in the local zoo who we hoped to one day release from her captivity in another lycanthropy story you remember 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 gone half man but okay obviously there's not a whole lot of face eating going 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 you 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 has 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 it 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 it 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 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 mane or pluck our postal workers feathers but it is a possibility lycanthropy 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 and first-hand 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 they're 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 hear games native languages Ducks have quack o catchphrases mice might say X 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 animals 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 experience 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 by I'm assuming that if you make your eyes a different color or change out anyone saying like hey what your has 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 season as lathers the owl is why is it knowledgeable just like we see Al's portrayed in popular culture read the Fox is 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 lycanthropy 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 boor 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 characters psychology is assigning the animals to the people 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 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 all so 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 an 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 hell what do you call us the player the person who is literally controlling that individuals 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 characters psychosis when asked about the role mental illness played in the game hell-blade Sinha was sacrificed ninja theories 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 neighbour 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 hope so 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

Channel: The Game Theorists

Views: 2,993,901

Rating: 4.8653879 out of 5

Keywords: animal crossing, animal crossing new horizons, acnh, new horizons, lycanthropy, new horizons animal crossing, isabelle, animal crossing new horizons trailer, animal crossing new horizons island, animal crossing new horizons gameplay, animal crossing new horizons music, animal crossing 5 star island, animal crossing tarantula island, animal crossing new horizons tips, animal crossing new horizons tour, isabelle smash, tom nook, game theorists, game theory, matpat

Id: XiuE-Wt7qik

Length: 16min 40sec (1000 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 06 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/secretly-a-mess]

And the Toss Boi cameo lol