Crowdsourcing and Animal Crossing: New Horizons

This past week has been a lot to process. In fact, this whole year has been a lot. It is enough to make you truly go crazy if you do not have the proper coping methods to take some steam off. Call it childish, but video games have been an outlet for me in this time. I used to play video games a bunch on my Game Boy and Game Cube as a kid, and I have now graduated to the Nintendo Switch. One of the games that has been extremely helpful with giving me a break from the absolute insanity of the real world is Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It's a hard game to explain. There isn't an ultimate goal to the game. You just go to an island with a couple anthropomorphic animal buddies and build it up to a functioning mini society of sorts. You eventually get a museum, a general store, a city hall... and then you just chill out. You can go fishing, build your own furniture, etc. It has been helpful in giving me some semblance of control over my life during this time, and as a self-labelled perfectionist that has been invaluable.

This week, one of the topics that we are learning about is crowdsourcing and I found a silly little example of crowdsourcing while playing Animal Crossing this evening. It may not be directly related to the idea of crowdsourcing as we are referring to it in this class, where it is used to gather information and ideas through a large group of people, but it is nonetheless crowdsourcing! In the game, in order to build a piece of infrastructure, like a bridge, you have to gather donations from you and your townsfolk. This is done by way of this weird little gyroid character named Lloid who sits outside in the area that you want to build your infrastructure, rain or shine, and collects the donations. As I was giving a donation to Lloid for a bridge I want built in the game this evening, I was like, "Wait, this is technically crowdsourcing, isn't it?" Then, as I was reading for class this evening, I learned from Konsti-Laakso's (2017) article that "...citizens' participation, knowledge and creativity are increasingly sought after. Citizens are a very heterogeneous group in terms of their capabilities, but as Thapa et al. (2015) summarize, the benefit of involving citizens as co-creators is based on the citizens' intimate knowledge of local affairs" (pg. 135). Although my island doesn't need the collective knowledge nor creativity of its citizens in this task of coming together to gather donations to build this bridge, it is relying on the participation of monetary donation from every citizen. My island villagers and I are acting as co-creators of this little structure that we will all benefit from.

I understand that this blog post might be a little strange. You're probably thinking to yourself, "Erin, what are you talking about? You're comparing your readings for a graduate course on education to a video game. It's a video game, it's not that important." Maybe the quarantine did make me go crazy...