In this article, I argue that players perform the trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic upending their everyday lives through their embodied interactions with the game’s soundtrack and its sonic enactments of temporality. 1 As Aubrey Anable notes, “Video games might be key emotional and cultural touchstones,” and nowhere is this truer than the infinitely expanding archipelago of Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ islands during the pandemic shaping the ways of being in the world under new technosocial conditions. Most recent scholarship about Animal Crossing focuses on its capitalist subtexts, but little has been written about its unexpected cultural significance during the pandemic, and even less has been said about its soundtrack. The latest installment of Nintendo’s simulation franchise, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, launched mid-March 2020, and it quickly transformed from an unassuming island-escape game to a venue in which players constructed the pandemic as a cultural trauma and wrestled with its temporal effects. Such a perspective traces the ways in which trauma theory has the potential to inform audience reception to video game music.Īs the COVID-19 pandemic began to force the world to stay at home, millions of casual video gamers, like me, boarded flights to their own private islands, courtesy of Tom Nook, an entrepreneurial tanuki. Further, music-centric events in the game’s local-level narrative dictate the speed at which the game is played, embodying the fragmentary temporal experience often attributed to the effects of trauma. Looped background music creates a Muzak-like affective environment that contributes to workplace nostalgia as players complete menial tasks. The repetitive soundtrack offers a psychological space for players to grieve while also enacting a sense of temporal regularity. Drawing on the trauma-informed analytical frameworks developed by Maria Cizmic and Judith Herman, this article contends that Animal Crossing’s easy-listening soundtrack provides an aesthetic rhetoric through which players perform the pandemic’s traumatic effects. The latest installment of Nintendo’s sim franchise, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, launched mid-March 2020, and it quickly transformed from an unassuming island-escape sim to a venue in which players constructed the COVID-19 pandemic as a cultural trauma and wrestled with its temporal effects.
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