That was a close one
As we spend yet another holiday in quarantine, especially one that usually means celebrating with a big group of people like New Year’s Eve, video games are a good solution for helping things feel a bit more normal. Sure, you can’t get together with a big group of your friends, but you can gather your entire Animal Crossing town, throw on a festive hat, grab a glowstick, and count down with your favorite virtual neighbors.
Players from New Zealand and Australia have already started sharing clips of their celebrations online, complete with fireworks, and we’ll only be seeing more of them as the rest of the world crosses over into 2022. While most of the pictures or videos chronicle the adorable, but mostly normal festivities of various gamers’ towns, one video in particular showcases a hilarious coincidence.
At about fifteen minutes to midnight, Reddit user u/CP1919- was hanging out in the town square, waiting for the countdown, when they suddenly noticed a tarantula had wandered its way into the crowd. The residents all freeze in horror as CP1919- slowly approaches with their bug net, and then release a collective sigh of relief as the intruder is caught.
This player not only got to enjoy an Animal Crossing New Year’s Eve celebration on their island, but become the hero of it, and I think that’s a really fun moment of emergent storytelling you can only get in a video game. Every once in a while, Reddit actually does something good for humanity, and in this case, it’s to make a community where players can share these funny, unique, and sometimes unbelievable moments in the games we love.
I personally haven’t visited my Animal Crossing island in months, but of all the holiday celebrations I’ve seen from New Horizons, the New Year’s one has got to be one of the most fun, in my opinion. Even just seeing other people post their videos makes me feel a little bit more in the spirit of things when I can’t celebrate in the way I usually would. So please, keep sharing your own special moments from your favorite games, especially when you suddenly become an action hero. Those are my favorites.