I Want to Be Free: Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Minecraft, Free Guy, and the Pleasures of World Building in Video Games

This chapter considers video game customization through the lens offered by the film Free Guy, about a non-player character (NPC) whose existence is upended when he learns that his existence is not his own. The journey of the film’s protagonist, Guy, is to take control over his own destiny and be the author of his own experience, in much the same way that gamers take control within world-building games and then further expand that empowerment through modding. This sort of in-game agency is explored through the examples of Minecraft and Animal Crossing: New Horizons. One pleasure of the unique spectatorship role of video gaming is the degree to which it offers its player control, not only to play within the game but to play at and with the game, shaping its reality through their own personal lens.