Dear Punchy: Representing and Feeling Writing in Animal Crossing

People love their villagers in Animal Crossing. When they aren’t writing about them on the internet, they’re writing to them in the game. This article explores the letter writing system in Animal Crossing, and it considers how writing helps to build emotional attachment between player and villager. If I had the chance to re-write this piece, I would probably add in a discussion of how letter writing is often used to hack various games in the Animal Crossing series to allow for a wide variety of modifications and consider what that says about writing within video games as an affective tool. Sadly, this dream will have to wait, but this article does have some pictures of spicy ads from the 90s!