Keywords
Daniel Defoe; Robinson Crusoe; Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, Animal Crossing, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, COVID-19, Play, Social Isolation, literary adaptation
Document Type
Features
Abstract
Set on an island in a distant locale, the Nintendo Switch game Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020) borrows game elements from eighteenth-century texts of exploration such as Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Gulliver’s Travels (1726) in its recreation of an island setting. Set into its moment of production, the spring of 2020 and the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the action of playing the game during a moment of social isolation also recreated the action of being Robinson Crusoe, by shaping an island to the liking of the game’s player. Using game studies scholar Ian Bogost’s theories of play as being constructed by the imposition of limitations, this essay explores how Defoe’s text is recreated, both textually and experientially, in the act of playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons during the stay at home period of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the continued interest in narratives of isolation and personal agency.
Recommended Citation
Douglas, Christopher
(2025)
"A Videogame of the Plague Year: Mapping Robinson Crusoe onto Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020),"
Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe and His Contemporaries: Vol. 16, Article 5.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.70213/1948-1802.1112
Available at:
https://cedar.wwu.edu/digitaldefoe/vol16/iss1/5
DOI
10.70213/1948-1802.1112
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Language
English
Format
application/pdf
Type
Text