CRAFTS IN THE TIME OF COVID

Each morning, I get out of bed, put on a new outfit, and step outside into the crisp spring air. Perhaps I shake some trees to harvest fresh fruit or spend my time fishing in the pond behind my home. In the afternoon, I visit Skye or Denise, my arms laden with peaches and presents. When the sun begins to set, I take out my phone and design patterns for quilts, sweaters, and canvas prints. Such is life on the idyllic island I inhabit in Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

Two months ago, I had grand plans for my final project of the semester. Instead, this paper is about Animal Crossing and the way that the newest installment in the life-simulation videogame series has become, for many people, a way of coping with the anxieties of a global pandemic. Over the past week, popular newspapers and magazines—everything from The Guardian and Time to NPR and Wired—have noted that Nintendo could not have released New Horizons at a better moment. Its slow pace, mellow music, and serene landscapes render it an escapist sanctuary, even as its synchronized real-time clock and small, attainable daily tasks help us make sense of the sudden feeling that time no longer has any meaning.¹

While New Horizons inspires a general feeling of relaxation, I want to attend specifically to the Custom Designs and Pro Designs applications that run on the player’s in-game smartphone (or “Nook Phone”). These apps enable players to design bespoke apparel, upholstery, and art pieces that they can wear, sell, and display in and around their island homes. Drawing on my work on the material, discursive, and ideological interweaving of textile crafts and videogame computing, I situate the Custom and Pro Designs apps in relation to communal crafts and trauma textiles. In so doing, I consider some of the ways in which the game supports individual coping strategies through creative output and think about how it allows players to generate social solidarity in a time of physical distancing.

For much of March, I found myself thinking about Elaine of Astolat, the eponymous Lady of Shalott from Alfred Tennyson’s nineteenth-century lyric poem. Burdened by an enigmatic curse, the Lady of Shalott is condemned to weave images of the outside world through the distorted filter of her mirror. To gaze directly out the window is verboten. To leave her tower is to die.

Hyperbolic though such a comparison seems, the people I care most about are various kinds of immunocompromised and I myself have dealt with undiagnosed health issues that already impact my daily life. It would be naïve to dismiss the threat COVID-19 poses were I not to isolate. So I scrub my hands raw, sanitize the groceries delivered to my door, and venture no further than my narrow balcony. I am endlessly worried about the people I care about and the people they care about and the people those people care about in turn. Unable to focus, I spent most of March cross-stitching, each stab of the needle through fabric a reminder to inhale, to exhale, to carry on.

We can consider the image of weaving as a technique of coping with isolation or trauma to be a topos, “a stereotypical formula evoked over and over again in the different guises and for varying purposes.”² We find an early instance of this topos in Homer’s Odyssey, wherein Penelope keeps her opportunistic suitors at bay through the act of endlessly weaving a burial shroud by day and unraveling it by night. Here, weaving is both an occupation and a cunning ploy Penelope devises to protect herself; she promises to choose a suitor only once she has completed the shroud, and relies on the men’s ignorance of how long the “women’s work” of the craft takes in order to defer her choice indefinitely.

Topoi in literary traditions are not merely narrative filigree; we can trace them through material and cultural practices. They mutually reflect and shape human behaviors in the context of real-world events. As Erkki Huhtamo notes, “the borderline between media culture and ‘everything else’ is hard, perhaps impossible, to define.”³ In the case of stitching, weaving, and knitting, we can locate the topos within wider cultural patterns of coping with individual or collective trauma through craft.

Consider for instance how, during wartime, soldiers who might ordinarily have no interest in textile crafts took up quilting to occupy their energy when not in the trenches, embedding bits of their uniforms into these fabrics.⁴ In the 1990s, the Women Together collective—made up of both Catholic and Protestant women—stitched the Northern Irish Peace Quilt as a reconciliatory project that acknowledged the violence and trauma of the Irish Troubles. ⁵ In the wake of 9/11, Terry Helwig launched The Thread Project: One World, One Cloth, a collection of composite wall hangings woven together using yarn and scraps of fabric from everyday life donated by thousands of “thread ambassadors” around the world in a show of global solidarity.⁶

Perhaps the most poignant example of this kind of collective crafting comes from the late 1980s, when AIDS survivors and the friends and families of those who had died sewed and donated thousands of panels to the AIDS Memorial Quilt project, through which we see “the continued vitality of the quilt metaphor… and it’s potential to unify and heal.”⁷ Spread out over the National Mall in Washington DC, the communally crafted quilt was, as Ricia Chansky noted in 2020, “an undeniable visual force that orders us to reflect on the horrors of our modern epidemic.”⁸

The reality of today’s modern epidemic includes not only the horror of illness but also the extraordinary loneliness that exists as a corollary to the life-saving physical distancing measures we’re experiencing. If collective crafting is something to which we might gravitate as a way of finding hope and solace through the shared act of making—of interweaving our individual anxieties into a communal fabric—how then do we cope when we are unable to gather, unable to be in physical proximity to those we love most?

In an attempt to process the strange, suspended grief I’m feeling, I’ve stitched gifts for friends to feel closer to them. Because I can’t see said friends, the works rest on my desk as reminders of our being apart. The coping strategy has had to mutate.

In the conclusion of his chapter on media archaeology as topos study, Huhtamo writes:

It is best to conceive the topos as a temporary manifestation of a persisting cultural tradition, linked by numerous threads with other cultural phenomena both from the past and from the cultural context within which the topos has made its appearance.⁹

Topoi are malleable in that they can shift from one medium to another, modified by—and in turn modifying—culture. Through my own experiences—echoed not only on gaming forums but also on cross-stitch and craft forums—I trace the topos of collective crafts from material or analog textiles into the digital design of crafted objects in New Horizons. This shift is the result of a confluence of factors, foremost among them the social and cultural practices of physical distancing. But it is also resolutely material, a consequence of the hardware affordances of videogame technology, paired with the fact that many of us can no longer get craft supplies—not when supply is down and getting food is worry enough.

Perhaps the distinction between those games and New Horizons lies in the formulation of the latter as creative labor (of love). There’s a difference in where we locate the work of creation and craft when the player becomes the active designer. Although not material in the same way as cross-stitching is material, designing in the Custom Pro Designs apps is near identical to the process of patterning for cross-stitch, down to the imperative to negotiate color selections using a limited color palette. The initial creative outline is surprisingly similar (and just as time-consuming, with a single pattern sometimes taking hours to design), even though the material act of making differs considerably from how the game code renders the same pattern.

This serves, to me at least, as a crucial reminder of how media platforms are always contingent and culturally contextual. The retreat into New Horizons not only for entertainment but also as a platform for creative production speaks to a material shift with respect to our ability to access goods and portion out time at a moment where we are encouraged not to leave home. Zielinski reminds us that “the notion of continuous progress from lower to higher, from simple to complex, must be abandoned, together with all the images, metaphors, and iconography that have been—and still are—used to describe progress.”¹⁰ I want to be careful to clarify that I do not see the move from material creation to digital design as progress; rather, it is a contingent response to a strange, uncertain world, one that speaks to the material and discursive needs of particular individuals and communities.

My argument for how New Horizons provides craft communities with an opportunity to generate social solidarity in virtual space is not without its critiques, nor is the series more broadly devoid of flaws. Ian Bogost has argued that “Animal Crossing deploys a procedural rhetoric about the repetition of mundane work as a consequence of contemporary material property ideals.”¹¹ He defines procedural rhetoric as “a technique for making arguments with computational systems.”¹² That is to say, the models of the world that videogames construct and embody necessarily affect how people learn, and they do so by formalizing rules and processes.

Much can be said of the way that New Horizons, like other installments in the series, reproduces and naturalizes capitalist and consumerist ideologies. The player’s overarching goal, insofar as one exists in the game, is to pay off their loan to entrepreneur Tom Nook—only to become endlessly indebted with subsequent home expansions. Most of the game’s activity revolves around everyday chores like picking weeds, watering flowers, and chopping trees. Play involves the repetitive labor of tidying up the island, storing branches and seashells, and then selling those items— only to start back up again. In some cases, players might even wait three or four hours in virtual queues to visit a stranger’s island just to sell turnips at a high markup on the “stalk market.”

The design applications exist somewhat outside the game’s labor cycle; there is no money to be made by designing custom stepping stones, quilts, or sweaters. The capital they generate is cultural, grounded in the online exchange of designs. And although, unlike knit sweaters, these digital objects have no material use value, neither are they the vectors of illness.

From the perspective of political economy, we can also critique the way that the exchange of crafts in New Horizons is contingent on Nintendo’s platformized business model. Although videogames have been platform-dependent since their inception, the emergence of networked infrastructure has catalyzed a transformation of the larger market architecture that shapes cultural production. Platformization refers to the consolidation of networked interactions into a single channel or platform by a corporate owner.¹³ This process pointedly restricts users’ agency as cultural producers and has significant implications with respect to the distribution of cultural and economic capital.

To put it plainly, I can’t give you a design I made in New Horizons the same way I can hand you a cross-stitched charm or email you a sweater pattern as a PDF; the exchange requires us each to have a Nintendo Switch console, a physical or digital copy of the game, and a subscription to the Nintendo Switch Online service.¹⁴ From here, I can give you my Animal Crossing: New Horizons Creator ID—unlocked around a week after starting the game—and only then can you access my patterns.

Writing on the valences of free labor in the digital economy, Tiziana Terranova emphasizes the blurry boundaries between work and creative expression.¹⁵ She connects the digital economy of participatory culture, wherein users become active content producers, to the “social factory,” which harnesses low-cost labor from social agents rather than industrial producers. This kind of free labor often becomes subsumed within the structures of capitalist commodity culture.¹⁶

Nevertheless, this free labor isn’t unavoidably exploitative; we can give it willingly and knowingly in exchange for the pleasures of communication and artistic expression. Although Nintendo may indeed profit from the way that crafters have turned to New Horizons to cope with the isolation of physical distancing, as well as the sudden shifts in the material infrastructure of how craft supplies circulate, the very real feelings of hope, joy, and connectedness that players experience is in no way diminished as a result.

New Horizons would have undoubtedly been a success without COVID-19 and craft communities would have found a different way to unite through shared creative production had the game not released when it did. But the material and social conditions of our particular cultural moment have given rise to a peculiar move from materiality to online exchange in craft communities. And I do not believe it is naïve to find hope and connection where we can.

NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

¹ As Twitter user @LeBearGirdle has informed us, “Thirty days hath September, / April, June, and November, / all the rest have thirty-one /Except March which has 8000.

² Erkki Huhtamo, “Dismantling the Fairy Engine: Media Archaeology as Topos Study,” in Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, ed. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 28.

³ Huhtamo, “Dismantling the Fairy Engine,” 35.

⁴ See Annette Gero, Wartime Quilts: Appliqués and Geometric Masterpieces from Military Fabrics (Roseville, Australia: The Beagle Press, 2015).

⁵ Anne Carr, “Women Together in the Darkest Days of the ‘Troubles,’” Open Democracy, May 16, 2014.

⁶ Beverly Gordon, Textiles: The Whole Story: Uses, Meanings, Significance (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2011), 146.

⁷ Elaine Showalter, Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 174.

⁸ Ricia A. Chansky, “A Stitch in Time: Third-Wave Feminist Reclamation of Needled Imagery,” The Journal of Popular Culture 43, no. 4 (2010), 683.

⁹ Huhtamo, “Dismantling the Fairy Engine,” 41.

¹⁰ Siegfried Zeilinski, “Introduction: The Idea of a Deep Time of the Media,” in Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, 1-11 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 5.

¹¹ Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007), 267. Bogost writes of the first installment in the series, but the game’s model has remained relatively consistent over the last two decades.

¹² Bogost, Persuasive Games, 3.

¹³ For an excellent definition and discussion of platformization, see David B. Nieborg and Thomas Poell, “The Platformization of Cultural Production: Theorizing the Contingent Cultural Commodity,” New Media and Society 20, no. 11 (2018): 4275-4292.

¹⁴ At $4.99/month or $24.99/year, Nintendo Switch Online is not inordinately expensive, but it smarts to have to pay for the wireless connectivity built into the system’s hardware—connectivity that was free since the DS and the Wii. For those of us who can afford to drop $400 on a console and another $80 on a game, it seems silly to complain about an additional $25/year, but it’s the principle of the matter.

¹⁵ Tiziana Terranova, “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Social Text 18, no. 2 (2000): 33–58.

¹⁶ See also Suzanne Scott, “Repackaging Fan Culture: The Regifting Economy of Ancillary Content Models,” Transformative Works and Culture 3 (2009).