Center Stage: The Museum (Animal Crossing series)

In “Center Stage,” Wolfman Jew discusses environments and level design across the games industry. They may be single levels, larger sandboxes, or broader settings. They may be as small as a room and as large as a world. Some may not even be good. But they are all interesting.

Like other life simulators, Animal Crossing can be pretty weird from the conventional “win / loss” perspective of many video games. We tend to associate most games with goals and end points, which many games of the genre do have, but Nintendo’s series is meant to go on forever. There’s always a way to reach the credits, and it tends to connect to some kind of narrative climax, but the only real ending is the one you choose by stopping. When you finally decide to not say hello to your delightful dumb animal character neighbors, that’s it.

But not having an established end doesn’t mean the game is devoid of goals. Whether paying off your mortgage, improving your town’s reputation, or helping characters find their way to a new home, there’s always some kind of progression you can make. When you start playing an Animal Crossing game, a lot of your early play is invariably spent following these paths. Getting out of debt or unlocking areas drives your attempts to collect, to buy, to interact. The most recent and successful entry, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, even has an in-game achievement system meant to nudge you into exploring. The best, though, is the Museum.

Image: Source Gaming. All images in this article come from my island in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, since I could provide them directly and it’s the graphically nicest installment. But the ideas are true across all five mainline entries.

Every Animal Crossing game has a fairly small number of things to do in practice. Mostly, you use an item, like an axe or slingshot, on something that exists naturally in your town. The majority of things you collect are by way of those tools. You catch bugs with the net, dig up treasure with the shovel, catch fish with the rod, and the sale of those bounties comprises the income for improving your house or buying something cool. This is what leads to the soft grind, where you spend a bit of time each day finding items or pulling weeds in a slow accumulation of wealth. You interact with the world by profiting off, replenishing, and cultivating it, and whatever you get out of the game is dependent on what you do with your town.

Image: Source Gaming. The lobby, where Blathers waits (or sleeps, in the day hours) for visitors and patrons.

The Museum provides an alternative use for some of these items, and an alternative way to contribute to the community. Part natural history museum, part art gallery, it’s a local exhibition for things provided exclusively by you. When you catch a fish for the first time, you can sell it to the general store or go out of your way to donate it to Blathers, the fussy owl curator. He’s always on the lookout for any new things you can give him. And one goal you can choose to follow is the typically unmarked quest to fill out each exhibit: bugs, fish, sea creatures, fossils, and art. It’s not always uniform (sea creatures were first added in Animal Crossing: New Leaf, and brought to New Horizons through an update months after launch), but the general water / bug / bone / portrait quadrumvirate holds. Almost like its own take on the classical elements.

Image: Source Gaming. One of the areas in the giant main insect exhibit. As it’s presumably under a sun roof, the light changes with the day.

Filling out the museum’s catalog has minimal material value. When you’re the mayor in New Leaf, adding an item slightly improves your approval rating. It doesn’t improve the town’s rating in any entry, though. Every item you donate is given free of charge, so you get no money from it, either (though it’s the only place where you can authenticate fossils, which do sell for a lot). If you choose to help Blathers realize his dream, the only value you get out of it is a personal sense of accomplishment. Gamers are conditioned to expect rewards for doing hard work; in this case, the reward is simply a happy owl and a filled museum.

Image: Source Gaming. Coco, my favorite neighbor, is exploring the first fish exhibit. It’s for freshwater fish, so you won’t find any of the sea creatures, like squids or crabs.

But it looks so great when it’s finished! The way the tanks burst with beautiful fish, the way the insects’ wings and noises turn into a quiet symphony over the soft music, the staid artworks; they all look and sound and feel great. There’s the generic sense of accomplishment you get just by filling out the marks on the checklist, but it feels great to actually walk through the halls of the museum and see everything you’ve donated. New Horizons even adds extra bells and whistles, like plants for the fish and light sound effects to accompany the dinosaurs. This is probably the reason why so many players try to at least fill it out at least slightly. It’s hard to walk through the immaculate, empty hallways and not be a bit excited to see it filled.

Image: Source Gaming. The hall that takes you to the main fossil exhibit is primarily filled with early life fossils. Those lines on the floor go all the way to the main and back rooms, linking the town’s animal villagers to the remains of their ancestors from the Paleozoic to the Cenozoic. Or the Cambrian, like the myllokunmingia here.

This kind of soft cosmetic reward is fitting for Animal Crossing, a franchise that prides itself on friendliness and comfort. Realistically, you spend roughly around thirty minutes a day tinkering about your island, collecting things to sell, and finding other things to buy. Most of these things end up being fish or bugs, which are widespread and easy to collect. It’s a quiet experience, what Super Smash Bros. Brawl once called “the slow and easy life.” Every longterm goal of the game takes time, because you’re at the mercy of the weather, the hour, the day, and the month, but that’s okay. You do it all a bit at a time, and without a strict reward for filling out the exhibits there’s no failure for missing out.

Image: Source Gaming. The second fish room is dedicated to shallow saltwater fish, and the tanks have gaps for stairs and a pathway. There’s even a sea butterfly tank you can safely walk over.

Untethered to any main plot, the museum becomes more of a way to justify the actions of the day. Every time you get a new insect or fish, you can donate it before finding duplicates to sell at the local store. Each new month brings in at least a few changes in the local zoology, so September might be your first chance to catch a red dragonfly or your last to catch a dorado, at least for a while. It helps direct your work, especially since many creatures are rarer or have odd requirements. Maybe it attacks you. Maybe it spawns in nonconsecutive months, at odd times of the day, or in a weird, hyper-specific spot. Getting flies and ants to spawn demands you strew garbage around. Finding fossils is easy—in New Horizons, I get at least four every day—but they’re always random. Again, a slow process, but a relaxing one, and if your day can get a bit of a boost by giving Blathers a panic attack as you donate a hard-won miyama stag, all the better.

Image: Source Gaming. The main fossil room is a highlight featuring skeletons of Tyrannosaurus, Archaeopteryx, Juramaia, Triceratops, and a model of the K–Pg extinction event. Notice how the lines on the carpet from the first room continue to tell the story of the evolutionary process.

As for the art… it’s more complicated. Every portrait or statue is real, from the Mona Lisa to Michelangelo’s David. I suppose there’s something odd about them being in a friendly video game when the actual role of museums in colonialism is a serious topic, and it would be nice if there were more artworks that didn’t come from Europe and Japan, but perhaps a more pointed criticism is in order. Namely, that art in Animal Crossing is and has always been a colossal pain to get. You can’t dig it up, you can’t find it in the wild, and you certainly can’t make your own.

Image: Source Gaming. The mostly filled art gallery. I remain incredibly grateful to the artworks a friend gave me close to publication. Without them, this statue section would only have three pieces, and much of the (out of view) glass case to the side would be empty.

While you might get lucky and be gifted a piece by a neighbor, your main avenue of art procurement is Redd, a huckster fox who comes to town at random days and sells one of four pieces at high prices. Even worse, many of them are fakes Blathers will reject upon appraisal. Sniffing out the real ones is hard—borderline impossible in some of the earlier games. When you take into account the likelihood of it being a fake, the likelihood of it being real but a duplicate, and Redd’s limited and inconsistent stock (his ship appears around once every two weeks, and you’re only allowed to purchase one of his four offers), your opportunities to get a real piece that hasn’t already been donated is poor to start and only gets worse over time. I managed to get every bug, fossil, and fish donated (though it took me until this month to get the last two sea creatures), but my New Horizons art collection was painfully limited. It was only thanks to an online friend that I managed to secure thirteen pieces less than two weeks ago just so this article could have a more photogenic gallery. It was so much more threadbare before, but it’s a gorgeous room now; at present I’m only missing five works of the total forty-two.

Image: Source Gaming. I swear, Redd started selling that fake rock-head statue (it’s not supposed to smile!) the day after I bought a real one from him. The serene painting’s real, but it’s a duplicate as well that I bought in case a friend wanted one. This is his second store on Harv’s Island; it was added in an update two years after launch and is quite helpful, but his stock is no less spurious.

Still, the art gallery provides a great atmosphere that compliments the scientific exhibits. For how overtly cartoony the game is—a town of talking animals!—the more relaxed and soft tone makes it feel slightly more “realistic” than most Nintendo worlds. That kind of feeling is at its peak when you see a digital recreation of The Birth of Venus or a Terracotta Soldier, each with a short description. The same is true with the exhibits that keep certain species of bug or fish together. Sure, it’s a game, and an especially fantastical one at that, but it works hard to keep its illusion alive.

Image: Source Gaming. The butterfly pavillion is especially gorgeous; the game even pipes in the bugs’ movement to make a quiet symphony. The back room is less pretty, but its specialized habitats for scorpions and ants are fascinating.

Beyond its place as a collection of art and science, the museum is also something of a cultural center for the town. In some games it hosts an observatory run by Blathers’ sister, as well as relaxing coffeehouse The Roost. This is much more irregular; the observatory was only featured in two of the five mainline games, and The Roost was only in four (and in the fourth, only via an update almost two years after release). But this idea also comes through in smaller ways, like how villagers have a random chance of spending a while each day looking through the exhibits. They’re always so shocked to see that you donated each shark or beetle. Whether in big ways or small, it is a part of the community you build and live in. They value it, and that does feel good when it comes from Lucha the jock bird or Patti the friendly cow. Not Rodney, though; that guy’s the worst. So happy he never darkened my island town of Soft Waves.

Image: Source Gaming. The unimpeachable Brewster takes my to-go order while my second favorite neighbor Alfonso relaxes at the counter. I swear, he and Coco were both visiting the day before this went up.

That’s what it is as a communal space, but what is the Museum as a video game space? It’s not a central hub or a map between areas. It’s not a level, certainly. It has things to look at but not to do. You could say it’s a place to achieve victory, but that’s not quite it. No, what it is, more than anything, is mixed use space. It’s a bookless library that lets you see exhibits, get biological info from Blathers on whatever living things you’re carrying on you, and enjoy an atmosphere of safe calm. It’s also a repository, like the home you can upgrade, but instead of collecting your personal effects it collects the world of the game that you yourself have explored. And it’s a relaxing and exceedingly pretty environment even by the standards of the series. It’s there not for you to “do” things in the video game sense, but to appreciate what you’ve already done.

Image: Source Gaming. My single favorite location in the game, the deep sea room, is breathtaking when full. A second tank behind the stairs to the right is also quite lovely.

And I think that gets to the heart of why it’s fun to do the museum side quest, and why it’s fun to play Animal Crossing. There are victories you can achieve, but nothing so overwhelming that they “need” to ever be done. There’s a world you can interact with on very simple but engaging terms. And the achievements you do are very charming and engaging and fun. It’s a game of simple joys, but a place like the Museum never feels quite so simple.