In the summer of 2016, Abdullah Naser, a 17-year-old student in Ontario, Canada, was suffering from what he later recognized as an episode of crippling depression.
“My mood was constantly down,” Naser, who posts YouTube videos about games and gaming, told me recently. “I didn’t want to go outside or interact with people, and the smallest inconveniences or setbacks during the day would send me spiraling with negative thoughts. I completely lacked the motivation or drive to set a daily routine for myself.”
Confining himself largely to his bedroom, he spent the only energy he could summon playing his Nintendo 3DS. It didn’t make him feel any less miserable, but it filled the hours.
And then he picked up Animal Crossing: New Leaf. The game—a “life sim” that casts you as the mayor of a small town full of animals—provided him with a sense of the routine he was lacking and the constant promise of new things to look forward to. He was moved, he says, to be more like the version of himself he saw in the game—positive, proactive, productive. And he was encouraged to get back on his feet by what he perceived as the game’s implicit “I think I can” philosophy of life: “The game throws you into an unfamiliar world where you have no money, no friends, and have no idea how anything works. But the more you play the game, the uncertainty of that goes away. It’s a version of life in which everything works out.”
Animal Crossing has recently gone what, in a less awful time, we might have called viral.
