An Interesting incident took place in the Elementary school classroom of Twitter user @zikatu1 related to Animal Crossing. The teacher has a lot of students who enjoy playing games in their free time. He was surprised when one boy told him, he didn’t like games anymore, and in fact, now hated them.
The teacher asked the child about the reason for this change, to which the boy told him about his father being a gamer. The father and the son share a Nintendo Switch at home.
While playing Animal Crossing, the child had decided to jump theirs ahead by several days to cut down the waiting time for some time-triggered event in a game he was playing. Now the Switch has an internal clock/calendar which games rely on to trigger events in the game.
The boy changed the time in on the system without telling his dad. When his dad started the Switch to play some Animal Crossing: New Horizons, he realized that the time had advanced in his game by several days. . Unfortunately for the dad, the gameplay mechanics for buying and selling turnips, was one that makes prices fluctuate up and down over time.
The main problem was that the father had grown turnips to sell, but the turnips get spoilt and become worth nothing after a week. This loss really upset the father which made him fine his son for one million Bells (in-game currency for Animal Crossing). The father appointed his son to make back the money he had lost in the game and told him that he was not allowed to play any game until the money was made.
The son told the teacher “After I get home, I have to go to work,” as he grinds the game with repetitive tasks.
“If the dad wants to play games, he should buy a separate Switch just for his personal use. Sharing is just asking for your save data to get messed up, and that’s something he should have learned back in the Famicom and PlayStation eras.”
The boy told the teacher
“I heard a junior high principal say the way to make your kids hate games is to turn their in-game progress into a responsibility.”
“Quotas steal all the fun and dreams from an activity.”
“I totally understand. I used to love playing games, but then the Xbox and PS3 came around and they started having built-in achievement and trophy lists, and I just lost all interest since it felt like a quota I had to meet.”
Now for the boy to earn one million yen in the game through gathering fruits and shells is a long and monotonous task. The boy needed to gather at the very least, 834 shells with a variety of fruits to be able to get on track.
This was an interesting example of a fun way a gaming father punishes his son for not playing the game properly and for changing settings on a shared console. The intention of the punishment must be to make the boy value other people’s games, but this punishment seems like a joke gone too far.
