Plus, only a small fraction of Animal Crossing players, even lifelong series fans, will still be playing the game daily even one year later. In the real world, we need jobs done ~forever, regardless of how novel and fun they are.

Game design is fundamentally about feeding a steady flow of novelty to players. Too little and the game gets boring immediately, too much and the development team can't produce new content fast enough, or the game is too short. I can imagine someone arguing that we could rotate people through jobs as their interest fades, but we should be skeptical that we can maintain our standard of living when most jobs are being done by people whose professional experience includes novelty at the rate even a dull game offers.

Many (most?) people don't need novelty to want to keep working. Many people find fulfillment and enjoyment in the routine of their work.

Think about it, how many people are cheerfully running shops because the shop is also their community? People need to feel useful. They need to feel valued. They need community. Work provides all these things.

Also, many jobs do provide many forms of novelty as one can seek to continually improve at them.

The Animal Crossing world also makes no sense. The main business in the game builds you a house on a loan with no deposit, no mandatory repayments, and no interest. You repay the loan by selling sea shells and common weeds back to this same business. None of the other villagers are ever depicted working, they just wander around and chat.

Even as a game, it doesn't fulfill the same kind of enjoyment as the tycoon games. It's fun no doubt, but its not the same kind of fun. There is no struggle or risk in AC, only idle grind. Part of what makes economy games fun is watching the charts, seeing them turn downwards, and trying everything you can to turn those charts back around. Taking risks, having them either propel you to success or ruin your business.

The economic elements of Animal Crossing can be understood as a solution to a natural problem of a game featuring item collection: what do you do with excess collected items? How do you ensure the player feels like the main gameplay activities are still worthwhile even when they're not adding new fish, bugs, etc. to their compendium? The game wouldn't play much differently if shop items were free and house upgrades were unlocked over time or by collecting enough unique items, but money adds a very familiar way of measuring progress, which is psychologically much different.

AC makes sense as a video game trying to be fun, but it can't at all be taken as some kind of system that could be used in reality. Having someone build you a house which takes thousands of hours in exchange for some foraged junk with minimal utility could never work.

Imagine if the Nook store was not just a void where items come and go infinitely but it was an actual market networked with other players. The value of most of the items in the game would drop to 0, the game would become significantly harder and less casual.

No one would exchange their gold nuggets for clumps of weeds, no matter how many weeds you offer.

Sure, which is why my post started with a long list of the ways that the Animal Crossing world doesn't resemble our own. I guess the main point I'm trying to make is that you can't really see Animal Crossing as depicting even an idealized form of capitalism.

I think there's also an aspect of not being able to work too much because what can be done in a single day is very limited. I believe this was intentionally designed into Animal Crossing; you work a little every day and that's it. Without cheating you've got to be patient and intentional.

> Who wouldn't want to live and work in that world?

Who would want to? There are a lot of jobs in the real world that do work this way, and they are generally not the most desirable jobs. E.g. data entry or picking fruit or customer support or working on an assembly line.

The ability to improve, scale your work, and over time make a bigger impact with less effort is one of the key things that makes any kind of work interesting.

Not to mention a lot of the the most desirable jobs, like, say, professional athlete or movie star, tend to work very differently than what you're describing. Many people work very hard in those fields and never succeed, it's the combination of hard work and skill and a little bit of luck/randomness that makes it interesting.

In the real world, there's no amount of work that someone employed in data entry or fruit picking etc. can do that will give them the wealth, lifestyle or prestige of the CEO that runs their company. There are no idle rich in Animal Crossing. Even Tom Nook is always working, and it doesn't seem like he generates excess profits from his businesses.