Playing Through the Pandemic: A Psychocultural Analysis of the Videogame Animal Crossing New Horizons.

Abstract

This thesis explores the videogame Animal Crossing: New Horizons (ACNH) (Nintendo 2020) as a digital cultural phenomenon that has become a critical space for navigating loneliness, intimacy, and selfhood among Millennials and Zillenials (aged 18-35) during the COVID-19 pandemic and within the context of neoliberal societies. Drawing on Winnicottian Object Relations Theory (Winnicott, 1971) and situated within psychosocial (Hollway and Jefferson, 2000) and psychocultural (Bainbridge and Yates, 2014; Giffney, 2021) research traditions, the study investigates how digital play functions as both a transitional object and a “third space”. A triangulated qualitative methodology was employed, comprising 12 psychosocially informed semi-structured interviews, photo elicitation (player-generated artefacts), and researcher reflexivity. These approaches were used to explore ACNH as a site of meaning-making and emotional navigation. Grounded in a constructivist epistemology, the study recognises knowledge as co-constructed through subjective experience and the dynamics between researcher and participant. Thematic analysis revealed that ACNH functioned as a potential “third space” (Winnicott 1971), facilitating emotionally sustaining solitude and mediated intimacy through digital world-building. While single-player modes offered comfort and creative autonomy, multiplayer features introduced complex negotiations with vulnerability, co-presence, and social norms. Findings suggest that the game’s flexible mechanics both uphold and subvert dominant ideologies, including those of gender and neoliberalism. This reflects the boundary-crossing potential enabled by contemporary technological platforms (James and Leader, 2023; Marsh et al., 2016). Players navigated the game’s open-ended play to explore identity, engage in self-expression, and perform affective and digital labour. In some cases, this transformed leisure into “playbour” (Törhönen et al., 2019; Woodcock and Johnson, 2019). At the same time, aesthetic movements such as “Cottagecore” offered a form of nostalgic escapism, highlighting tensions between pastoral fantasy and socio-economic reality (Ryan and Tileva, 2022). These dynamics became especially salient during the 2020 pandemic, when ACNH served as a digital refuge for processing grief, cultivating relational care, and staging acts of cultural critique within the constraints of a commercial game environment. My psychoculturally informed research suggests that the game facilitated multiple forms of boundary crossing and belonging, allowing players to navigate between the “True Self” and the “False Self” (Winnicott, 1960).