The pandemic has got everyone cooped up at home, and Nintendo was really lucky to have just released a game like Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The boredom nudged many people to purchase a Nintendo Switch and the Animal Crossing game, jacking up prices by almost 20%.

At the height of the craze, I learnt how to modify the game code and generate items in the game. It was a fun process to break into a system, understand how data is represented and make new friends from the game modding community. However, people who aren’t tech-savvy are generally afraid of the word hacking. At one point, Nintendo announced strict measures to clamp down on game modding / “hacking” and many laymen were very worried hacks breaking their entire game.

This articles reflects on how games are designed and the economy around cheating detection.

Animal Crossing Design #

Firstly, Animal Crossing features a user inventory, analogous to a personal storage database. The user inventory was stored locally, so the game file could be loaded on a computer. A text editor, even notepad, could be used to modify the item codes of every inventory slot, in effect generating items. By iterating multiple item codes, it was even possible to obtain items that would not be possible to obtain the regular way, such as time-locked items tied to festive events.

Interestingly, hackers were sell generated items to legitimate players via an online multiplayer session. One way Nintendo can counter generated items is to synchronise every user’s inventory with their server. This way, it would not be possible to modify the save file and still be able to join online play if the game loads the data from the server each time.

However, doing so is highly inefficient, and the cost might outweight the benefits. A game that offers micro in-game purchases might want to sync data with their server. Advanced cheating protection is important since one user cheating is one less user paying money for in-game items.

However, Animal Crossing is a game that is purchased once and played forever. There is no recurring payment model. So, more precisely, Nintendo can actually detect cheating and hacking really easily. It’s just not sensible to spend resources detecting cheaters when they could invest those resources in creating new features and new games.

Investing in Insurance #

Gaming companies are aware when people hack their games, but have to make the decision on whether or not it’s worth to set up defenses.

Similarly, we can tie this thought back to the whole conundrum on computer security. Is it worth it to pay for anti-virus software? How much? How can we justify the exorbitant cost of cyber defense?

Outside of tech, these questions are important in every domain of life. When it comes to personal health, many people generally agree that it is worth spending a little more money to keep our bodies healthy, by paying for exercise or nutritious food. Besides degraying the costs of seeing a doctor, we also increase our general well-being and have a peace of mind.

Remarks #

Overall, it has been a fun few months being involved in the Animal Crossing modding community. During my time playing the game, I also ran a satirical Animal Crossing news site and created weekly crossword puzzles based on in-game trivia.

You may check out the 5amcrook.