Nintendo Asks That You Please Not Make Animal Crossing Political

Animal Crossing: New Horizons has transformed from a simple video game to a lesser form of a social media network. Whereas past games were just simple life sims for people to build homes and catch bugs, nowadays Animal Crossing has been used to host talk shows, advertise products, protest governments, or even promote politicians.

Nintendo, of course, hasn't been blind to all this. And in response to the growing popularity of their life sim (which is almost certainly due to COVID-19, at least partially), they've released this: the Animal Crossing: New Horizons Usage Guidelines for Businesses and Organizations.

It's pretty much exactly what's on the tin.

We deeply appreciate that so many people around the world are having fun with Animal Crossing: New Horizons (the Game) for Nintendo Switch. Thank you for your support and for helping us build such a wonderful community.

While our services and products are generally for personal use only, we understand there may be situations in which businesses and organizations would like to use or reference the Game in relation to their business. As such, we would like to share a few guidelines with those businesses, organizations, and anyone representing them, to preserve the experience for the millions of people enjoying the Game recreationally.

If we see your activity is not following these guidelines or is damaging or having bad influence on the community, we may ask you to stop such activity or usage of our contents, and take appropriate actions, including prohibiting your future business usage of the Game.

The guidelines themselves aren't terribly outlandish for the most part, basically asking that people keep things child-friendly and honest. But Nintendo has also requested to avoid making things "political", which is, of course, impossible: not speaking is a statement for the status quo, so everything is political by default.

It's not clear if, when, or how Nintendo plans to police this.