Animal Crossing Plaza

~ the eulogy ~

Most products die without meaning to. This one shipped with the ending already written into the announcement. When Nintendo revealed Animal Crossing Plaza in 2013 it said in the same breath that the app would be available for a limited time, and then it kept that promise sixteen months later, which is a rarer thing than it sounds.

It went up free on the Wii U eShop on 7 august 2013 in North America and Europe, a day later in Japan. It was a companion to Animal Crossing: New Leaf, and New Leaf was a 3DS game, so the app existed to give a handheld title somewhere to live on the television. What you got was a plaza. A square with series characters standing around in it, and a wall of posts from the Animal Crossing community on Miiverse. Monthly polls ranked villagers, and news about New Leaf came through the same room.

This was never going to be my shelf. I was 29 and did not own a Wii U. Animal Crossing has not had a Turkish moment in any of its generations, and the Wii U was the least owned home console Nintendo has ever made, so the honest description of the audience for a free companion app to a 3DS game on that machine is small, and entirely aware of who it was.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually was ~

The one feature with real weight was the SD card. New Leaf let you take screenshots on the 3DS, and the Plaza could read them straight off the card and turn them into albums or into QR codes you could hand to somebody. In 2013 that was close to the only route from a Nintendo handheld to the rest of the internet that did not involve pointing a camera at the screen.

Everything else in it was Miiverse wearing a costume. Miiverse was Nintendo's own social network, built into the Wii U and the 3DS, moderated hard by humans, full of drawings people made with a stylus on the touchscreen. The Plaza took one community off that network and gave it a room and a cast of animals, so the posts you read there were posts you could have read anywhere else on the service. The room was the whole product.

~ the day it died ~

Nintendo pulled it from the eShop on 22 december 2014 and turned off posting from inside it on 31 december. If you had already downloaded it, the app stayed on your console and you could keep going in to look, which meant it settled into a long half-life as a reader for other people's old posts. That ended when Miiverse itself ended, on 7 november 2017.

Sixteen months on the store, then three more years as a museum with a locked comment box. The whole thing cost nothing and never pretended to be more than it was.

~ what it was rehearsing ~

Nintendo has spent two decades building social layers and then switching them off, and the Plaza is the smallest clean example of the habit. It was a shared space attached to one game, run by the platform holder, with no way to reach anybody outside it and nothing you could carry out when it closed. Seven years later Animal Crossing: New Horizons became the biggest game on earth for one spring, and the way people shared their islands was screenshots posted to Twitter, on a network Nintendo did not own and therefore could not switch off.

That is the trade in one line. A plaza run by the platform holder is quiet and safe, and it lasts exactly as long as the platform holder feels like paying for it.

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