Animal Crossing is more interesting than we thought, it seems! Whereas we (read: I) found the improvements in Wild World a poor trade for NES games, and not enough to hold our interest after a year or so of Gamecube Crossing, academics are speaking out in appreciation of Nintendo's pointless-by-design communication game.The latest essay on Henry Jenkins' blog, is an excerpt from a thesis by Kristina Drzaic, about "secrets" in Animal Crossing. The idea is that other games feature glitches that allow the player to redesign the game in small ways and alter the basic experience, whereas Animal Crossing features such "glitch-like" abilities as part of the natural design of the game, and allows even more customization than the engine was designed for. One example showed a player creating a narrative conflict between herself and Tom Nook just by trying and failing to buy some candy.
We were just wondering aloud why customizable content was so compelling! Good thing there are people smarter than us out there.
[Via GameSetWatch]
As if those vile tulips weren't content with terrorizing the innocent population of Amsterdam, they've now spread to the wild world of Animal Crossing on the DS. Some unfortunate virtual villagers mistakenly thought they were receiving a wonderful new gift from Nintendo today, only to be pricked by the thorn amongst the "Red Tulips". If you receive a gift marked as such, pawn it off on Tom Nook right away.
There is no clearer indication of human folly than the keyboard typo. Not content with exposing the 
I'm not sure what the association is between the color blue and the concept of death, but blue tends to be the color of choice when it comes to informing the player that something has gone terribly, terribly wrong in the game. Perhaps burnt sienna or turqoise just didn't have the clout to convey the severity of the situation, and red would only add to the player's fury. Have you ever encountered Animal Crossing's polite, but unceasingly blue screen of death? 
