Reason not the need, but one of the first things I did when I was properly falling in love with Animal Crossing: New Horizons involved building my own version of the Very Large Array on a far corner of my island. The VLA is a telescope array in New Mexico. I’ve been fond of it for a long time and for a number of reasons. It’s in Contact, and Contact is a good film! And my uncle lives in New Mexico, so I have a sort of familial association. Not that he gives a fig about radio telescopes.
Anyway, one day I was paging through one of the catalogues in Animal Crossing and I realised I could buy a radar dish of some kind. I ended up buying a bunch of them and I set them up at a suitably distant point. Some nights, even now, when I am feeling more than typically emo I wander over to stand by them and imagine what they’re studying deep in the vast expanse of the Animal Crossing universe.
Sometimes, because I am a massive loser, I take a few screenshots. Sometimes, I even pull out the in-game camera and snap away on that. Last night, though, I did something I’ve never done before. I pressed the selfie button – it may not be called that. Instead of pressing + to take a picture, I pressed – and discovered I could now appear in the picture. And I have to tell you – it’s changed a surprising amount for me.
Context: I was worried that when I completed the art gallery I was going to play the game less and less. This game has been a companion to me for almost as long as I’ve had a Switch, or so it feels. And there has definitely been a tailing off of use. Without the art gallery to complete – I care not for the other galleries in the museum – I haven’t had a ritual to pin a daily island trip on. Besides a coffee with Brewster, that is, and it turns out that a coffee with Brewster is something I can handle on a weekly basis.
But now I’ve used the selfie camera, I’m back in again. I’m in deep. I think I must have used this camera before, because I seem to have a few snaps with me in them, which is very much the selfie camera’s whole deal. But last night I wasn’t worried about getting me into the pictures. Instead I was seeing this world which I know well but which I typically see in a sort of proscenium manner, kept a polite distance from the action, like a well-behaved theatre goer who has turned off their phone. I was seeing it from something that felt like first-person.
I spent an embarrassing amount of time out there at the VLA, suddenly able to tilt the camera up, to see the telescopes loom nobly overhead. And then I started to wonder how widely I could use this thing. Could I take pictures in the museum like this? Reader, I could. And I could suddenly glimpse the upper mouldings on the walls and the dithering shadow as the overhead space lofted up and out of view. I had never seen this before. It felt wildly illicit.
After that I took the camera around everywhere. I’m still doing it. It’s a series of revelations. I have bad eyesight so I don’t really always see a lot of the smaller details in games, so for the first time I was able to get up really close to see the sign outside Brewster’s cafe. I now know what it depicts! And once I was in the cafe, I was looking all over the place. What’s actually in the room behind Brewster’s bar? What’s actually on the time-stained photo frames on the far wall?
I probably sound addled, but there is something specific about this experience that feels very rich. Here is a world that I know very well, and that I have been in so long that I’m moved from exploration to a kind of enacting of worn-carpet rituals. Not just that, but it’s a world that I’m slowly getting ready to leave behind. And yet just as I’m primed to say goodbye, I discover this new and rather startling way of being present in it.
All of which is to say: what a game. And maybe try building a VLA of your own. It’s worth it!
