"On Sable (Animal Crossing series)" [draft] by Patrick Simpson

Sable means a lot to me.

NPCs in video games usually have a few default responses that play over and over again if you continue interacting with them. This is true even for the Animal Crossing series---you'll exhaust your neighbors' dialogue if you keep coming up to them again and again (they get irritated after a certain point (IIRC---it's been a while since I last played)). Many players---including myself---feel an impulse to obsessive completionism (not just in Animal Crossing---in which the focus is on your unhealthy relationship with the predatory (but still lovable) Tom Nook, who keeps encouraging you to take out bigger and bigger loans to upgrade your house in the village---but in video games (and life) more generally), which makes any new dialogue feel like a win. I love Sable a great deal---I love that the game does not in any way call attention to her or make it seem as though something might happen if you talk with her regularly. But the game series has been around long enough, and has become popular enough, that by this point, there probably aren't many players who don't already know that you can "unlock" more Sable dialogue through daily talks. It's a well-known mechanic---and it is also only a mechanic (as much as I love her, Sable is only a creature of pixels and code).

I love this video (embed above) showing all of Sable's dialogue from Wild World, but I do find it a little perverse to see all of it without putting in the Real work of playing the game and talking with Sable daily. What makes me even more uncomfortable are the titles of some of the other videos I saw while searching---for example, "BREAK down Sable to get 11 designer patterns in New Horizons" (funny, but also a little too Real---making the cold, inhuman, transactional nature of the relationship a little too explicit, for my taste). Even the word "unlock" has weird connotations to me: hence my use of quotation marks around it (I'm wanting to distance myself from the idea of anthropomorphic characters being like puzzle boxes or safes you can "unlock"). The logical endpoint of this kind of purely transactional, completionist approach to play is the literal slave labor that Minecraft implicitly encourages, as Dan Olson wrote about in "Minecraft, Sandboxes, and Colonialism" (a fave of mine, having been a fan of Olson and Folding Ideas for several years now---I especially love the thumbnail: "OOPS! I did a colonialism in MINECRAFT ?!").