Then, suddenly, you know it, you don't have to go into detail, and it's as simple as just walking away from the area. Just look at the horizon. That's all it takes. Just look at the stars. All of these have changed.-2 AM
This song is so beautiful and feels like an exit. It's a way to escape. It's a way to escape from the worry and anxiety that you have. It's a beautiful song, but it can't help you.-7 PM
I really hope you're now catching the rarest fish in the wild.-1 PM
A few days ago, as I was listening to the “Animal Crossing: New Leaf” soundtrack on Youtube, I started to read the comments section and was surprised by the emotional outpouring I found there. People were discussing their in-game memories, yes, but they also were reminiscing about the environments their gameplay once occupied: a long summer break, or the seat beside their best friend in middle school. (New Leaf was released in 2012 and is a game “for kids,” meaning its target audience was around their late teens when I was reading the comments in 2020.) Youtube comments are notorious for sometimes being inane or downright offensive, so I was heartened to see, for example, someone share how New Leaf helped them through a difficult illness, and others replying with notes of sympathy and encouragement.
How did group therapy sessions emerge from the mire of Youtube comments sections, of all places? Well, I think Animal Crossing fosters that sort of emotional investment in others. In this game, players live in a village alongside talking animals. Though scripted, their dialogue and actions brim with personality; it’s easy to develop an affinity for your NPC neighbors. Time also passes concurrently with the real world, adjoining the village’s experience of nighttime, the Spring, and New Year’s Day with our own. The shared clock might make the game feel more like an extension of the real world rather than a separate universe, or at the very least deepen the tinge of wistfulness which accompanies an extended leave from the game. Since New Leaf was released almost a decade ago, many commenters likely have not visited their village in years, the game’s soundtrack now a landmark in a childhood locale they’ve outgrown. Youtube is a popular venue for sharing and accessing video game soundtracks, so it’s natural for those who want to return to these songs to find themselves here, eventually convening semi-anonymously in the comments below the video.
I remember playing New Leaf at midnight, and getting really emotional as I cried, trying to explain to my villagers that I was okay and that I was the only child in the world that was crazy. They all cringed and cried, but I managed to find my way back to my town and this song still stands in my head.-12 AM
This song reminds me of when I played this game and my mom screamed, "LUNCH!"-12 PM
The music in Animal Crossing games changes each hour, making the parallel course of time even more evident. For the game’s players, each song evokes a certain time of day: commenters on the video for 7 AM talk about gaming with their schoolmates on the morning bus ride, whereas commenters on the video for 3 AM share creepy moments they remember during all-nighters. In other words, some of the memories are specific to not only a certain year in one’s life, but also a mere revolution of the minute hand, the space between a blue sky and one that’s just a bit darker.
@Sneaky_Doggie I used to play it in the morning, when the shops were open and we were still kids!-7 AM
For this webpage, I trained the GPT-2 language model on the comments for all the Animal Crossing: New Leaf soundtrack uploads I could find on Youtube. I included weather variants and excluded covers, remixes, etc. for a total of 21,900 comments. I fine-tuned the model on comments for each hour’s theme to generate synthetic comments specific to each hour. Finally, I curated the synthetic comments to form a shortlist of poignant, funny, and representative results. When you click on the villagers they will recite one specific to the hour during which you are visiting, according to your internet browser. The quotes on this page are all examples of synthetic comments.
That glowing town of Bluebell... well, most likely.-6 AM
I feel like I have a new world and I just can't seem to find my way back home. I can't even begin to describe the nostalgia I have for this game, and for some, it's overwhelming. I miss the old Animal Crossing, and for some, it's still fresh out of the box.-12 AM
I was just about to get a coffee but when Isabelle said she was going to be "baking" something was amiss.-10 AM
My purpose is to explore the harmonics between these memories, their common motifs and modes of speaking. Nostalgia, sadness, and innocence spill from the brim, depending slightly on the time of day. But what else? Using the GPT-2 model as a filter, I try to prod at grammar and syntax to reveal recurrent associations. And, of course, to have fun. Here's an example: at 6 AM, the bird in “early bird” springs to life:
I felt a chill and saw that the music was reversed. I opened it up and saw the little birds pecking. I opened them and saw that the town was again alone. I opened the door and went inside. There was a little bird perched on a tree and I saw it growl in the corner of my eye. I opened the door and saw the face of Townie walk out with a plump little bird on his head. "ARE YOU INTO WEDDY? YOU DON'T EVEN DIE FROM 2014-2015" It was freaking breakfast served me.-10 AM
“Bird” occurs in the text because many commenters discuss the “Early Bird Ordinance,” a game mechanic. But since the GPT-2 model I used was trained on a glut of internet detritus prior to me training it on these Youtube comments, the model finds that the phrase “bird” is often used to refer to a literal bird. Hence, the bird takes flight from its idiomatic role, free to “growl” to its heart’s content (I am unable to explain why it growls, LOL). On that note, I included a good number of comments which were bizzare to the point of revealing their non-human authorship, partly because they were hilarious, but also because I don’t want to merely replicate the language of the original commenters.
This song reminds me of the summer days, when I would swim in the pool, and I would play this theme. I remember getting home from a swim in the pool, and coming home from a few hours later. I have a shark in my pool. I have a few items I need to sell, and I have a beautiful pool. I feel so comfortable with the idea.-5 PM
So is Animal Crossing: New Leaf a very emotional game? Not to the extent, I would argue, that the sentiment of these comments suggest. Steeped in a longing for the past, their tone belies their retrospective point of view, even/especially when discussing specific moments in time. It’s almost to the point where one begins to question their authenticity, to wonder if there is a performative genre emerging from the corpus. Even the GPT-2 model, more inauthentic than any of the original commenters, has its concerns:
This comment section seems like it could be a stage play.-2 PM
The skepticism these comments tempt remind me of the skepticism us adults have for the worries of children. Yes, we know now that our best friend moving to another town is not the end of the world, but it surely felt like that as an eight year old... or did it? Maybe that’s the nostalgia talking, and we actually forgot the part where we felt totally fine an hour later after finding chocolate ice cream in the freezer. It’s hard to say; there’s a blurry logic to the bias of our memories. The sentiment of the comments varies greatly with the time of day—often fearful and lonely at night, hopeful in the early morning, industrious in the afternoon—but this, too, is partly the work of my curatorial choices. (I also tried to enhance the uniqueness of each hour using data augmentation.) Either way, I'd like this project to serve as a site of discovery for childhood memories that are held within, or felt toward, certain times of the day, perhaps so that we may be more perceptive of them as they occur in the present moment.
This song reminds me of the summer days at the sea,after dinner...-8 PM
it sounds like a room full of fireflies, so long as they don't get bored.-10 PM
I would always come back to my town and play this game. There was no point in going to sleep without my mom telling me. I would always just sit on a bench and just watch the sky.-2 AM