I Joined the Animal Crossing Black Market and All I Got Was Fun and Friendship
If you had told me two years ago when Animal Crossing: New Horizons was released by Nintendo that I would not only still be playing the game but that I’d also end up intertwined in a complicated social network of unsanctioned, underground trading and competitive game building, I would have told you…that is a probable outcome and a fair assessment. I’m an Animal Crossing super fan and after enough compounded days of isolation during the current pandemic, I’ve become an Animal Crossing crook. I’ve also had the label of “cheater” hurled at me, all in the defense of the honor of a game where you live in a little pretend house, and build a pretend island for your pretend little animal friends.
This is all very intense considering the stakes, I know. It may come as a surprise to learn that there is a vocal community of Animal Crossing purists who poo-poo at every strategy I’ve now adopted as a regular player.
For those who have spent the brunt of their pandemic experience chasing children around, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, or ACNH, is the newest installment in a game series that puts the player in the middle of a fully functioning village that they can customize into whatever world they wish. If it sounds overly simplified, it’s because the joy of ACNH is in its simplicity. When I booted up my Nintendo Switch to play the game for the first time in March 2020, I was greeted by the game’s most enduring businessman, a tanuki (raccoon dog native to Japan) named Tom Nook, who explained to me that myself and a handful of animal villagers had landed on an deserted island that we were to transform into our new home.
Through the use of hundreds of thousands of props and customizations and an in-game currency known as Bells, I’d be able to design any environment from a bustling cityscape to a rural countryside so long as I had the time and the inspiration to do so. It’s like Second Life, if Second Life had fewer weirdos, or Minecraft with a more developed environment. As far as escapism goes, I haven’t found anything that comes close to competing with the island I’ve developed, a “citycore” themed community that I have lovingly dubbed “The Isle of Kayfabe” after my favorite pro-wrestling terminology.
I learned the hard way that as a pandemic worker who had to continue full time employment away from my house, the biggest barrier to total creativity was time itself. What Animal Crossing takes from the real world to program into the game, namely time of day and seasons, makes for an ultra immersive experience where the current moment is translated into a digital universe with a slower pace of activity. The game forces you to take tasks one day at a time, and features that help the developers pull this off include only being able to order five new props per day for your island, and an overnight waiting period for any bridges and inclines.
You know what? I think all of that is just great! I also am a grown ass person with a full time job and a brain that is wired for constant stimulus. A peaceful stroll through a virtual village can only keep my attention for so long, and after days and days in quarantine of doing just that, something stirred inside me that has sent me down a long and dark road of hacked islands and a network of in-game billionaires.
Well, Bellionaires to be exact.
Time decided to be on my side in December 2021 when I got slammed with Omicron the day before Christmas Eve. Equipped with nothing but dispensary edibles and my trusty Nintendo, I figured I’d take my mandated ten days of rest to obsess and preen over my island. On the first day, I consumed hours of content on YouTube from ACNH who have packed almost two years of experience into their “dream builds” and decided that I too wanted to join the upper echelons of twee gamers with grandiose visions.
Motivated to build the Animal Crossing island that I’d always wanted, my first stop was the trading website Nookazon, which has gained notoriety over the years as a reputable tool, even boasting its very own chat features and a fully developed app for iOS. Nookazon allows users to make in-game purchases of any object they could ever want, so long as the seller is advertising their wares online, and the buyer keeps an exorbitant amount of Bells on hand. The biggest downside to the website was at first, the amount of inflation. Objects that could be purchased through Nook’s Cranny for a couple hundred Bells might sell on Nookazon in the thousands. Objects originally priced in the thousands would in turn run you hundreds of thousands, if not a healthy million or more. In taking out the stress of searching for the perfect items and villagers, Nookazon added a fresh list of tasks to my in-game days, as I now needed to hustle and keep the cash flowing and bells ringing to keep up with my new and expensive habit.
There was a lot I enjoyed about Nookazon, but what I enjoyed most were the visits to the islands of complete strangers I’d have to make in order to drop off Bells and pick up items. It was fun to get a glimpse at someone else’s creativity, and snap a few digital pictures from the game’s camera function while posing next to an avatar character I’d likely never see again. After a trade between islands was complete, it was custom to immediately leave a mutual five star review between traders, complete with some baby talk words of praise. “Sooo cute! Adorable island, great trade, uwu uwu uwu.” Throw in some flower and star emojis for extra spice, and then on to the next trade.
There’s an extra layer to ACNH trading, one ripe with opportunity for folks with the worst kinds of intentions to offer their opinions. One of the best elements of the game is interacting with your digital neighbors and villagers, so why not purchase your dream roster? Of all the species of randomly generated villagers who will move to your island, from alligators to elephants, my favorites are by far the deer and I set a goal of creating an island made up entirely of little deer citizens. To me, it felt like creating a resort town for a tailored community like Branson, Missouri, but instead of anti-vax boomers, I would design with delicate hoofed mammals in mind. This was all very exciting, until a 13-year-old with a cartoon profile picture Tweeted at me with an accusation of creating an “ethnostate.” I refuse to debate the ethics of villager trading, because villagers are little dolls, and dolls are not real.
I refuse to debate the ethics of villager trading, because villagers are little dolls, and dolls are not real.
I needed to gather up these deer, dammit, but at millions of Bells a trade, there was no way I was going to be able to keep up with affording this habit and make it out of quarantine with my dream lineup. I needed to turn to a platform run by people younger and savvier than me, even if I found it intimidating. I need to turn to, of all places, Discord.
Discord is an app that is as if you took all the fun and chaos of the early AOL chat rooms and put a shiny veneer of moderation and exclusivity over them and I like it that way. Think of your company Slack, but make it actually enjoyable. Discord is apparently also the bane of Nookazon’s existence, as pirate users use Nookazon accounts, links, and postings to advertise their exclusive ACNH servers and build up their membership numbers. It’s an insidious practice. I was fatigued from clicking on a villager for sale, only to see the seller’s bio packed with custom fonts and emojis to catch the eye of the unsuspecting trader. I’d click on an expensive villager, ready to make an offer to another player, only to find advertisements in the posting itself, boasting GET THIS VILLAGER AND 20 OTHERS FOR FREE! or JOIN OUR SERVER FOR FREE GIVEAWAYS AND EVENTS- UNLIMITED BELLS! Typical spam and I was too old to fall for it.
Okay, so, I fell for it. After hitting a wall of boredom and desperation, I couldn’t hustle for extra Bells in my game much longer. I played the fictional Stalk Market on my island, trying to build my bank account by purchasing turnips (yes, the vegetable) in lieu of stock shares, hoping to see prices soar for a quick payday. I had turned to the frowned-upon practice of Time Traveling, where you shut off the Nintendo Switch’s ability to tell time, and plug in your own date to leap ahead in the game and force advancement. I wanted those adorable, innocent deer, and I wanted them right fucking now. I held my nose, logged back into my unused Discord account and joined one of the servers that had been spammed up and down Nookazon.
I was wary. The promises seemed far too good to be true, but if you were willing to follow the rules of the server you were now a member of, the minor time taxes became a reasonable tradeoff. We’ll call the server I joined The Roost as an homage to their mascot, a barista pigeon from ACNH named Brewster who runs his own coffee shop. With over 12,000 members and a massive administration and moderation team, The Roost was the best attended of all the servers I had explored. It was only then that it hit me: the reason everything on Nookazon was so damn expensive was because these Discord servers had caused an out of control amount of inflation! I was about to be given the tools I needed to make millions of Bells in mere moments, and I felt no qualms about my new role as an ACNH Fat Cat.
The obvious draw of The Roost is primarily all the free stuff you can get. That’s why people join these servers to begin with. I entered with Bell signs in my eyes and the hopes for a coveted deer villager, a decidedly unwholesome attitude to have, and it turned into my greatest kid-in-a-candy-shop fantasy. Upon arriving at the server, you’re given access to two free “treasure hunting” islands that you’re encouraged to visit as many times as you’d like. Treasure islands are made up of thousands and thousands of free items organized neatly across the entire island map, and usually house up to ten of the game’s more popular villagers, who you can invite to move onto your own home island. This is just the beginning as far as unlimited items goes. Last time I counted, The Roost has upwards of twenty additional premium islands, including an option where you can program a bot to manifest whatever items and villagers you can imagine on demand.
In order to access more forbidden landscapes, users must make a donation to the creator of these fully automated destinations, a mysterious figure who accepts actual, real life money via Paypal and Kofi to pay for their labor. For an eternal ticket to the ACNH equivalent of Supermarket Sweep, you’d pay between $10-$20, depending on how many luxury items were on a particular island. The creator has little hand in the day to day moderation, depending on a team of young people who feel more like Internet camp counselors than any kind of strict authority figure. I had some Christmas money in my pocket and I was depressed as hell to be missing the holidays, so why not pay a little bit of real world cash for what amounted to the Ultimate Expansion Pass and total creative freedom?
My journey to perfection ended there, Nookazon be damned. Yes, I paid real money to an internet stranger so I could go buckwild in a game that is for babies. Yes, I am perfectly satisfied with this outcome. The Roost got me good, but it wasn’t all the treats I described that kept me around. As deranged as it sounds, the friends I’ve met along the way have made the entire experience a joy, and Discord bleeps and bloops give me the kind of serotonin hit to the brain that I haven’t felt since I was a kid in a late 90s chatroom.
My journey to perfection ended there, Nookazon be damned. Yes, I paid real money to an internet stranger so I could go buckwild in a game that is for babies. Yes, I am perfectly satisfied with this outcome.
The biggest rule is to participate in the server while using the treasure islands. Members spend days perfecting islands to be photo ready or construct elaborate games and mazes, all for the joy of hosting a bunch of strangers and new players in their digital town and giving them free stuff. You don’t even have to pick up your Nintendo to participate in the most fun community events. Last week I spent my Wednesday night doing online karaoke with a bunch of British twenty-somethings. Most of the conversations I have on the server have very little to do with Animal Crossing as the zoomers in the chats ask hard hitting questions for the olds like me, like this morning’s inquiry about what it was like to be a kid when Christina Aguilera’s “Dirrty” was released.
I’ve either gotten away with highway robbery or been totally ripped off. My Switch Lite system and the original base game cost me about $260, purchased the day before the first COVID related shutdowns. I’ve funneled in an additional $20 for an official Nintendo approved expansion pass and about $60 in fees from The Roost. This amount of money towards a game might seem absurd, but my Switch account tells me I’ve played a collective 600 hours Animal Crossing since starting my game. If I was being charged by the hour, it would cost a little under sixty cents an hour.
I love Animal Crossing. I love escaping into a world I’ve created all by myself. I also love playing the game that way I want to play it, regardless of what ACNH purists have to say. I’ll time travel, I’ll pour over Nookazon listings, and I’ll even pony up a little bit of pocket change to keep my (now complete!) herd of deer looking cute. When I look out at my fictional city kingdom, I will not think about how lonely it is at the top, but instead will invite as many Roost visitors as my island can handle so that we may run rampant and be silly.
Recommend If You Like pays all our writers. Some of that comes from our Patreon. If you've enjoyed anything we've done, cool. We have a Patreon. We promise that once we're bought by a billionaire or millionaire looking for a fun new vanity project, we'll stop asking for money. Until then, please consider the Patreon. If you can't afford to become a patron, please sign up to our mailing list. It's free and we're asking here instead of a pop-up.