By Mark Schafer

Animal Crossing is, at its core, a life simulation game. There’s really no overarching goal, aside from living your life. One obstacle though, is the loan on your house that you have to pay off, courtesy of Tom Nook, the resident raccoon overseer across all five Animal Crossing games. In my mind, this is an effective tactic for teaching children (and others who haven’t owned property, like myself) the ins and outs of home ownership. The loan amounts fluctuate across games as a result of how their respective economies work, and there’s always a progression whenever you add layers to your home.

For instance, in New Horizons, the first loan, a house upgrade necessary for you to move out of a tent, costs 98,000 bells, the main currency in the Animal Crossing series. You get bells by selling the bugs and fish you’ve caught, as well as the fruit and other items you have. Other items include furniture, which you can craft in New Horizons, and sell at the shop for double the price if it’s the Hot Item of the day. Other options to make money include selling turnips. Turnips function as a kind of stock market. Every Sunday before noon, Daisy Mae, the pig proprietor and inheritor of her grandmother’s business, comes to your island to sell you turnips, in bundles of 10 for just under 100 bells each. Then, in accordance with Animal Crossing’s mechanics of a real time clock, you wait and hold.

Now, as far as I’m aware, there are no external influences on the price of turnips. No other residents can step in, Tom Nook can’t act as an SEC-style trading regulator, nor is there a cap on how many turnips you can buy. This is just the stock market in its simplest form. Just hold onto them until you want to sell, or until Sunday, at which point they’ll rot, and you have to start again the next week. Sometimes this will happen in my case: I’ll buy turnips somewhere around 90 bells, they’ll depreciate to about 50 the next day, and then 40 the next day and I have to sell at a loss.

A thriving community has cropped up online, especially on Reddit but it could be on other social medias, where players with particularly high turnip prices invite other players to their islands, so they can make more money than they would on their native islands. The turnip market (or Stalk Market as it is sometimes referred to in game) actually had real-world impact. When Gamestop was experiencing rocketing highs thanks to the r/WallStreetbets subreddit, I saw a few memes indicating that they learned about investing thanks to this fake market from a video game. Regardless of your feelings about this whole Reddit and stock market phenomenon, I would say that that’s pretty cool.

There is another currency though which factors into this economy and influences the “market” of the game if you will. Nook Miles function as a sort of “frequent flier miles”, earned by completing various objectives or passing certain milestones in game. There are ways to earn a ton of miles, but like with most reward programs, they really hold no monetary significance at all and you’re the only one that can make and use them. However, there are Nook Miles Tickets, which allow you to visit a mystery island to gather resources used in crafting and selling and to find new villagers if you have an open plot; but you’re still the driving force for the local economy. At least in older games your other animal villagers bought items from the store, which isn’t the case in New Horizons. It added an extra layer of believability to this fictional economy, where other individuals put money in, and presumably grew business.

Regardless, Animal Crossing is a great resource for people just to learn the ins and outs of economics, even if it’s at a very basic level. Fans have even taken to creating their own trading site, Nookazon, where you can offer Bells and Nook Miles Tickets for all sorts of stuff, including in-game furniture, other animal villagers, bells and more Nook Miles Tickets. It’s the kind of “underground-niche-fandom” thing that only pops up in this special kind of circumstance. It’s the kind of thing that can only exist because of the lessons Animal Crossing teaches us about economics. This, and it’s a great life simulation game!

Mark Schafer is a guest contributor for NerdEcon. Read more of his great work at Mark’s Game Space (for games).