Gaming is often used as an escape from real-life pressures, but social media has made even the most laid-back games stressful. The plethora of social media posts showcasing masterfully crafted islands in has made many players feel inadequate. As a result, they're restarting their g꧅ames - and bur🍷ning hundreds of hours of hard work in the process.
The Pursuit of Perfection
Animal Crossing: New Horizons provides players with a world that's entirely theirs. They can terraform their entire island, place buildings anywhere they see fit, and decorate everything and anything to build their own little utopia. Normally, this would💙 be a noble pursuit. It would even be encouraged, as the ability to create something entirely yours is uniquely rewarding.
However, many New Horizons players are comparing their own creations to those with thousands of likes, upvotes, and shares on social media. When they look at islands like (who, it's worth noting, has a degree in interior design, owns an art company, and co-founded a fashion brand), they feel thei🌜r own ideas aren't anything worth bragging aboutꩲ.
After seeing the celebrated works of others, some players feel that their own ideas suddenly aren't cute enough, pretty enough, or tasteful enough to be worth maintaining. Whatever they do, social media shows them how someone else has done it better. This can even be seen with villagers, as having Raymond or Au🥂die on your island is almost a status s༺ymbol. Bec🎶ause of this, the bar for the ideal island is con🍬stantly raised to meet the standards set by users on social media.
Why Does It Matter?
What we're seeing with New Horizons players restarting their games is just another expression of social media's toxic effects. Unfortunately, the social simulation the Animal Crossing fran💖chise puts forward has enabled the negativity of social politics to bleed into 𝔉it.
Fo🐽r example, many young adults and adolescents experience depression because their lives don't reflect what's touted on social media. What they see are the elite flaunting their wealth, influencers posing in specific ways to mask their body shape, and the result of extensive but subtle photo manipulation. Then, they look at themselves, their natural bodies, their bank accounts, and think themselves lesser because they don't resemble the internet's idols.
Now, New Horizons players are allowing themselves to obsess over the minute details of their island for the same reasons. They see all the decorations someone with 10,000 likes on Twitter has, the idyllic layout of their island, their Raymond, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:gold roses, and so on.
What they often don't realize is that the people they admire generally pour more hours into the game, time travel, have experience from past Animal Crossing games, and know ways to farm for bells that the average player does ꦆnot. There are guides readily available for players to work the gaᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚme in similar ways, but then that detracts from the joy of playing at their own pace and for themselves. Instead, they start playing to be like someone else.
Remember Why You Play
If you, like many others, are tempted to restart your Animal Crossing: New Horizons game from scratch, remember why you play in the first place. Is it to be like everybody else? Is it because y✃ou saw other people's beautiful islands and wanted to make one of your own?
Whatever the reason, no game is worth playing if you're not having fun. The moment y🦋ou stop enjoying your experience is when you should move your attention elsewhere. If you feel overwhelmed by trying to retrofit your island to resemble other people's designs, you may find yourself running into the same problem over and over again. But, if you genuinely feel you can do better than your first attempt the second time around, by all means, start fresh. The only way to feel satisfied is to be true to yourself, 𝄹so always move forward with that as your goal.