In many video games you control a lone youngster who is new in town, and a kindly stranger shows up to offer a greeting and a few words of advice. Sometimes the advice is practical and specific (“Don't get too close to the water or a jellyfish will jump out and sting you”), and sometimes it is more general (“Do good and good will come to you”), and always it is important to the way your experience with the game plays out. Role-playing games are full of kindly strangers like this, characters who never really do much, save for wandering around the town waiting for you to come talk to them. There is even a name, and an abbreviation, for them: “non-player characters”, or NPCs.

You can occasionally make it through a role-playing game without talking to an NPC, but you will miss the point of the experience. Role-playing games are supposed to be about immersing yourself in a strange land and its strange customs, about taking in everything there is to take in with a kind of wide-eyed wonder. In RPGs you learn and you grow and you change, and you do much of that by just patiently walking around and asking questions.

Sorry for the long introduction. Animal Crossing: Wild World is not an RPG. It contains no adventuring. You do not get a shield or a sword or a magic potion. If you go too close to the water nothing bad will happen to you. Still, this game has much in common with the RPG experience. It is full of non-player characters, all of whom like talking very much. Sometimes they tell you things that make your life easier or more interesting. Sometimes they tell jokes. Some of them are capable of nothing but non-sequiturs. They are frequently idiotic, or at least kind of dumb, but they are the heart of the game. If you give them a little time and your full attention, they will make playing worthwhile.

Wild World is not really a game at all, at least not in the classic sense. There is no object and no goal and no larger purpose. There is daily life. You are new in town, and you have a little two-room shack for a house, and you are deeply indebted, for that house, to a raccoon named Tom Nook. You get a part-time job in Tom's store. You deliver some furniture. You plant some flowers outside the door to spruce things up. Tom is pleased, so he invites you back.

In your house, you drag a box around, trying to make it look like an armoire.

You wander around town and meet the locals. They are all cute stuffed animals. Some of them are grumpy. Some of them suggest that you plant fruit trees and open your own farmer's market. Some tell you that a fishing rod is the key to riches around these parts. And then, or possibly before then, if you are not a patient person, you realize that there is nothing left for you to do today. You turn off your DS.

When you turn it back on later, there is something to do again. Maybe Tom has a new task for you, or maybe there is a letter for you at the post office, or maybe the trees you planted are beginning to bear fruit and you need to start harvesting. You tinker, basically. In time, you realize that tinkering is all there is, and that there is no over-arching purpose to any of this.

For a while, you may work on saving up enough money to put an addition on your house, and for a while you may turn to gardening, and if you are an aggressive person maybe you will try to build yourself into the richest entrepreneur in town. Still, the method remains the same: You switch your little village on, you tinker for a few minutes, and then you put it away. It's a toy. Playing with it is fun. It doesn't mean anything more than that. It doesn't need to.