Unreality has never looked so good
Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is a growing rarity: a bountiful garden full of light and laughter in a messy and often callous world. Its players are encouraged to make Miis of their friends, favorite characters, and celebrities to fill an island. They talk about seemingly whatever ideas the player implants in the characters’ heads – even the inappropriate ones that Nintendo doesn’t want you to broadcast on social media – fall in love, fight, and generally get into hijinks and shenanigans. When’s the last time something felt so positively tinged with good vibes?
At a glance, Tomodachi Life seemed like just another cutesy life simulation series like The Sims. In that series, players also get to play God, designing characters, giving them quirks, hobbies, unique characteristics and features, and playing out the narrative arc of their entire lives. Games in this genre often serve as mirrors of the world, charging players with using their imaginations and observations to mold the characters and their trajectories with a stunning degree of realism, as well as an inkling of humor.
Tomodachi Life, as it turns out, is a different beast. It is a little more outside the box, and more closely resembles a funhouse mirror than a 1:1 reflection of its players and their world.
Take the game’s news function. As the player begins to populate their island, they’re inundated with broadcasts. Each one serves as a call for the player to keep on filling the island with their creations, be they a figure of their past, a weird caricature, or better infrastructure. These broadcasts appear on the air often in Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream, especially in the game’s introductory hours, which are rife with tutorials. But rather than annoy – or horrify in the case of the real deal – these updates are delightful, unlike the headlines that we’re subjected to in real life.
You see, Tomodachi Life is a brazenly humorous series, one that mines comedy from dropping Miis into wacky sitcom scenarios, the weird ways in which they speak (thanks to text-to-speech technology) and the bizarre depths of your imagination. You might catch a Mii asleep by the fountain in the town square, peer into their dream, and see them sneezing out couscous, which manifests the dish in their reality. Another might fantasize about Nintendo Switches with a dancing game falling from the sky in an endless targeted downpour and respond to the occurrence with a baffling, almost sensual, pleasure.
Reality in Tomodachi Life isn’t any more normal than the world of dreams according to the Mii News Network, which often shares “stories” that feel like they could be ripped from the chaotic happenings of a news feed in 2026. A Mii modeled after a close friend could be trapped in the faucet of a sink. In another update, the K-pop idol Jihyo might become a doctor who invents pills that make her half invisible, incidentally drawing more attention to herself. None of it makes any sense, but that’s the appeal, and it certainly beats the shit out of doomscrolling the actual stupidity and cruelty that passes for news in real life.
This bit of unreality, this flood of good news and nonsense, feels key to understanding the fervor and potential of Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream at this unprecedented moment of political turmoil. The series has been around since the Nintendo DS, but it’s never been quite as popular as it is now. And though the appetite and audience for games has understandably grown in the time between releases, voracious fans have absolutely sunk their teeth into and subsequently devoured Living the Dream at a scale and speed that far outpaces its predecessors.
Before Living the Dream was released, many took to its demo, complete with the game’s remarkable character creator, and imagined more than most thought possible. They flooded the zone with intense recreations of the characters and celebrities du jour (just take a look at the series’ very active subreddit) and even found the time to workshop the occasional Charlie Kirk or Benjamin Netanyahu meme.
Living the Dream, and more specifically its unreality and satire, comes across like a coping mechanism. A generation of gamers who can’t sufficiently cope with the horror of everyday living (who can?) and are confronted with it everywhere they turn have found themselves needing a place to vent their frustrations. Everyone’s unemployed and everything – eggs, gas, therapy, you name it – is exorbitantly expensive. And right now, in circumstances that Nintendo could hardly have planned for, Tomodachi Life title is playing the part of the jester beautifully. It is rending humor, not necessarily comfort, from anarchy.
This push and pull between reality and Tomodachi Life‘s well-meaning farce is a rich tension to watch play out. Living the Dream is dumb fun, even if it ultimately feels too juvenile and shallow to offer much more than a temporary release from the pressures of the real world. None of what’s going on in there is real, nor does it resemble any actionable good that can be carried over to our reality. But maybe that’s all it needs to be. Maybe Tomodachi Life is not a vehicle for great societal change. In fact, I know it’s not. But it does allow people to model a semblance of life that makes sense again, and that in and of itself is pretty radical.
It is uniquely funny (and at least a little interesting) to see lightning strike twice for Nintendo with this kind of fantasy. After all, the company has been here before with Animal Crossing: New Horizons. What does it say about us all that we are already running back to video games full of domestic fantasies? That a company like Nintendo can bottle up this slice of peaceful life and capitalize on it every time the world falls into disrepair?
The difference this time around is that players don’t seem to be fleeing their problems. A large part of New Horizons appeal was its serendipitous timing: it was released on the widely available Nintendo Switch console years into its dominant run and on March 20, 2020 of all days, barely a week into the beginning of the lengthy COVID-19 lockdown that temporarily halted the world. A tragedy so big and so undeniable that every sector of the planet was fixed to the news and inundated in the inescapable bleakness of the moment. It’s no surprise that players took to New Horizons with its island full of adorable animal neighbors and the facsimile of a healthy outdoors routine. It was a perfect way to drown out the noise.
Tomodachi Life‘s playerbase hasn’t tuned out the real world though. Instead, it has shown how acutely aware it is of the ills that plague it. Smudged the lens so to speak, and bent reality’s penchant for the ridiculous in its favor. Turned it into fodder to imagine a reality whose news doesn’t deal untold amounts of psychic damage and makes some fucking sense for a change.
