Colonization and Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons

In 1955, President Sukarno of Indonesia warned the delegates at the Asian-African Conference that “We are often told ‘Colonialism is dead.’ Let us not be deceived….How can we say it is dead, so long as vast areas of Asia and Africa are unfree” (23). It’s interesting that many discuss an era of post-colonialism when Okinawa is still under Japanese control and the U.S., along with its entire colonized mainland, maintains control over Hawai’i and Guam for example. Sukarno explains that colonialism has its “modern dress” (23), and I believe that video games are a modern-day method of exerting colonial influence. I argue that Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a method of justifying colonialism—particularly the colonialisms of Japan and the U.S., which is visible through its promotion of colonizing logics, its commodification of island cultures and its “island getaway” narrative, and the fact that Japan and the U.S. earn the most monetary profit from this game.

When you first begin New Horizons, the screen opens to a sign displaying the words “Nook Inc. Deserted Island Getaway Package.” You, a human avatar, are greeted by two anthropomorphized racoons (all characters other than yourself are anthropomorphized animals) who congratulate you on signing up for this “adventure.” You are then offered the opportunity to choose which “uninhabited island” you would like to travel to. After landing on the island of your choice, you are then incentivized throughout the rest of the game to chop down trees, capture fish and bugs to be placed in a museum or sold for Bells (in-game currency), and reshape the streams and land to your liking (known as “terraforming” in-game). One of your major goals is to make your island attractive enough to have the famous musician K.K. Slider want to visit you, and while boosting your island’s attractiveness can be done through planting flowers, it is also done by making paths and building fences.

On the surface, this game may appear to be about decoration and cute animals. However, as my friend Lou Chow put it, New Horizons is “colonization the game.” By no means is the island “deserted” or “uninhabited.” You arrive on an island filled with trees, flowers, fish, and insects. It’s odd to me that in a game when all the other characters are animals, your island is considered uninhabited when there is visible animal life, albeit life that is not anthropomorphized. Furthermore, the fact that a highly rated, attractive island is dependent on development (e.g. fences, paths, buildings) echoes the colonizing logic that undeveloped land is a problem. Players are not only able to but they are also incentivized to manipulate the land, the native animal species, and even other villagers to satisfy whatever whims they might have. Players can uproots villagers’ homes and move them whenever they please, which has affected some people enough to create animations on how cruel and concerning certain playstyles can be (see Densle’s “Mask | Animal Crossing Full Movie” on Youtube). Resource extraction, settlement building, and displacement are all normalized in Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

Additionally, another important site of analysis of New Horizons is the commodification of island cultures. As evident from the beginning of the game, New Horizons is innately tied to the idea of an “island getaway.” Furthermore, in the DLC (a paid game addition) Animal Crossing: Happy Home Paradise, you work as a vacation home designer for animal villagers who want a relaxing escape. However, across your homebase island there is widespread commodification of island cultures. Your DLC guides are wearing some essentialized version of a Hawaiian/Polynesian shirt (see Image A), and island visitors can even be seen “hula” dancing while wearing leis (see Image B). In her book From a Native Daughter, Haunani-Kay Trask maintains that the commodified version of hula serves to disrupt the sacredness and power of the dance and therefore the sacredness and power of Native Hawaiian culture (144). In the same way Edward Said explains how Orientalist images "are images in that they represent or stand for a very large entity, otherwise impossibly diffuse, which they enable one to grasp or see" (66), the above commodification of Native Hawaiian hula is just one example of colonizing countries distilling the power of other cultures into a form which is legible to their colonial gaze.

Moreover, one of your in-game coworkers always reminds you that “island life is meant to be relaxing.” Island life is not, in fact, relaxing for everyone, and in order to uphold this narrative, island peoples pay the price. Island peoples are not only funneled into the hospitality industry, therefore doing all the labor while tourists relax, but they also must perform a false temporality of existing in a land untouched by time, colonialism, or resource extraction in order to help sell this image of “island paradise” (Trask 143).

At this point, all the aforementioned begs the question; who economically profits the most off of New Horizons and its cultural commodification? According to Nintendo’s Annual Report for FY23, Japan made 365, 647 millions of yen and the U.S. made 592, 462 millions of yen from all Nintendo sales; they are the two countries with the highest sales (89). While this data isn’t New Horizons specific, net sales over the previous year similarly show that Japan and the U.S. are the countries that make the most from Nintendo products (88). Thus, not only do Japan and the U.S. profit the most from New Horizons, but they also profit the most from selling the idea of an island vacation. In Hawai’i for example, most of the profits from airlines, tour buses, hotels, restaurants, and golf courses go back to the home countries of the corporations which own the aforementioned businesses, and these home countries are Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Canada, Australia and the U.S. (Trask 139).

However, I want to conclude by emphasizing that while there are many areas of Animal Crossing: New Horizons to critique, the game itself is a joy for many. From personal experience and speaking with others, I know that New Horizons can provide a sense of control, and for women of color especially, having an outlet where one feels in control is particularly important when there are many aspects of life which we don’t have control over. Thus, if New Horizons is “colonization the game” (Chow), then what does it say that women of color, who take the brunt of colonial violence, find refuge in a game like Animal Crossing? It is odd that we who have been personally or intergenerationally harmed from colonization would find joy in executing the colonizing actions that may have displaced us or our communities, so it raises the question as to whether the sense of control we feel in Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a reclamation or a replication of colonizing ideologies.

Image A. Photographed by me on 5/5/24.

Image B. Photographed by me on 5/5/24.

Works Cited

Animal Crossing : New Horizons. Nintendo Switch., Nintendo, 2020.

Annual Report: for the Fiscal Year Ended March 31, 2023. Nintendo Co., Ltd, 2023.

Chow, Lou. “Conversation with Lou.” Apr. 2024.
Densle. “Mask | Animal Crossing Full Movie.” YouTube, YouTube, 2 June 2023,

www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoRvwKjoobE&t=3748s.

Said, Edward. “Imaginative Geography and Its Representations: Orientalizing the Oriental.”

Orientalism, Pantheon Books, 1978, pp. 49–73.

Sukarno. “Speech By President Sukarno of Indonesia at the Opening of the Conference.”

Asia-Africa Speaks from Bandung, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Republic of Indonesia,

1955, pp. 19–29.

Trask, Haunani-Kay. From a Native Daughter Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaii.

University of Hawaiì Press, 1999.