Should Players Buy Their Own UI?

Player Research
7 min readApr 29, 2020

Animal Crossing: New Horizons drops players onto a near-deserted island, with empty pockets and dreams of a self-made paradise.

A screenshot from the video game Animal Crossing New Horizons. It shows a sunset over a beach, with a character in the centre
Animal Crossing is a little virtual paradise — if you’re prepared to work for it…

For the first few hours, players are tasked with organising their new tropical home by crafting and using handy tools: spades, axes, fishing poles. Axes chop trees and yield wood; shovels unearth fossils and buried treasure. Players have to swap between tools continuously to tidy…

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