Cruising Animal Crossing
Edmond Y. Chang
I might be dating one of my animals. Maybe. Though, things have definitely reached Jake Gyllenhaal-Tom Holland bromance levels. I started playing Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020) about six months ago. While I know the game imagines and encodes just friendship between characters, I cannot help but queerly feel that there is something to talk about between myself and Kid Cat. One of my starting villagers, Kid Cat is a “jock” personality, who likes lifting weights, protein shakes, and offering Instagram-able fitness advice, all the while wearing a red spandex suit and Speed Racer-esque helmet. He is kind, upbeat, supportive, spartan in his decorating sense, and appreciates sporty-themed and red-hued items. Regularly talking with, doing favors for, and giving gifts to villagers earns you friendship, curious conversations, special nicknames, gifts in return, eventually culminating in the animal’s photo. There are no in-game dating or romance mechanics in ACNH but that does not mean affective bonds and relationships do not emerge during play. Moreover, without the compulsory mechanics of in-game love, courtship, or monogamy, ACNH instead offers a shifting, tangled, sometimes tingling web of connections, desires, and queer possibility.
Over days, weeks, and months, I pursued Kid Cat’s friendship and affection. I chatted with him, listened to him, exchanged tokens, caught him bugs and fish, and I even brought him medicine when he was under the weather. At some point, something changed, some algorithmic threshold toggled, and then the mail started coming. Kid Cat, it seems, is an avid letter writer, more so than any other of my villagers. One of his first letters reads, “To my fitness friend, I thought of a simple way to train my fingers. By writing letters, I can correspond with you while giving my digits a workout at the same time. My hands are going to be incredibly muscular! –Kid Cat.” While there is little in the few lines that are overtly sexual, the letter is flirty, sensual, embodied, and erotic. Here, I invoke Audre Lorde’s definition of the erotic as a “capacity for joy,” be it physical, emotional, intellectual, or communal; it is something that empowers, that excites, that is not something “relegated to the bedroom alone.”
Then Kid Cat’s messages start taking on a different tone, at times euphemistic, all the while still encouraging. He asks me if I am “getting’ it done” and shares that I am inspiration saying, “I’m way more ripped for being your friend. I run more laps, bench more weight, do more reps…” His jock personality evokes the homosociality of team sports, dug outs, and locker rooms.
He sends me gifts and compliments me matter-of-factly, “Oh, by the way, your arms are looking real buff lately! Nailed it!” By this point, I am head-over-controller in a queer relationship with Kid Cat—not just because I identify my character as queer or that our friendship is same gender—but because it is simultaneously sexy and not, romantic and not, redefining “friendship” as more than a measurable game variable. It is queerness as imagined by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “promises to make invisible possibilities and desires visible…[and] to smuggle queer representation in where it must be smuggled.” (There has been some attention to the ways queer players have been inhabiting ACNH as well as the inclusion of queer backstories.) The subtext is on the wall, and it is a feedback loop, a reciprocity that ACNH reinforces with each exchange between myself and Kid Cat.
Finally, the most shippy of all is when he sends me a sweat-soaked shirt to wear. He explains, “You like the clothing I sent? I bought it for myself, but then got it super-duper MEGA sweaty.” Because he thought it was my size, he sends his pheromone-laden gift to me. This little gesture triggers a cavalcade of “gay panic” memories: the “Hey Kid, Catch!” Coca-Cola commercial of 1979 where a limping Mean Joe Green trades his used game jersey for a hero-worshipping boy’s bottle of Coke, the “Body by Soloflex” print ads of the 1980s featuring a faceless man in mid-strip revealing a chiseled torso, and an olfactory flash-forward to the heartbreaking “shirt” scene in Brokeback Mountain (2005) where Heath Ledger’s character Ennis finds, holds, and smells his late lover Jack’s shirt (speaking of Jake Gyllenhaal), which layered over one of Ennis’s. To have, to hold, to be any of those shirts. Each function as a talisman, a transfer of energy, of desire, of possibility. None of these things are immediately sexual, yet all of them are erotically and emotionally charged.
Ultimately, this fantasy suggests that games can and should imagine and invest in a wider range of relationships that foreground alternative and queer desires and erotics not predicated on and perpetuating the sexualized, romanticized couple form. My connection with Kid Cat dramatizes the fact that video games are, as argued by Aubrey Anable in Playing with Feelings, “an interface for grasping a contemporary structure of feeling.”. The Kid Cat conundrum also evinces what I have called elsewhere queergaming, which asks of players and creators to repurpose “not only content and play but their very own relationship” to queer and non-queer games and communities.
I know I am not “dating” Kid Cat. I know that Kid Cat will eventually leave and forget me. (He hasn’t yet.) But it is still fun, silly, serious, and nice to think about.
