Reclaiming Everydayness and Japanese Cultural Routines in Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Abstract

ABSTRACT Upsetting familiar daily routines, cultural traditions, and seasonal events, the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted social and cultural life in many places around the world. In Japan, the absence of cultural and seasonal events, which play a central role in the annual calendar, and which serve as an important source of cultural identity, was painfully noticed. In search of adequate substitutes, many people have turned to digital spaces. How do these spaces cater to the need for familiar routines and cultural customs? How did users appropriate these spaces to reclaim everydayness? In this article, I consider these questions in the context of the widely popular game Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Nintendo 2020) and its related YouTube videos. Drawing on metadata and user comments for 282 Japanese-language YouTube videos that reference the game, I show how players and users interweave the game space and the YouTube space in various practices of recasting cultural customs and seasonal events. The interactions on YouTube further show the degree to which Let’s Play seriality is used as a way of reclaiming everydayness. As such, the analysis highlights the important role commercial digital spaces play in terms of stability and as discursive spaces for negotiating crisis.