“It is the most boring, long-winded, repetitive, condescending, infantile bullshit we’ve ever seen.” After a few more invectives, he posed a question: “Do people find comfort in tedious, bureaucratic, pandering authoritarianism?”
That quote was from Frank Lantz, who is the guy who designed Universal Paperclips. There's a bit of irony about the criticism of repetition, coming from someone who designed a game about clicking buttons over and over to make numbers go up.
Disclaimer: I actually think Universal Paperclips is brilliant, and agree that Animal Crossing has a lot of overly tedious and unnecessary mechanics. But I don't think it's fair to say that people who take comfort from it are just enjoying "tedious, bureaucratic, pandering authoritarianism".
I got completely sucked into it (the philosophy and "story" being a big part of that). It was fun to try and optimize, fun to follow events, and cathartic to reach the end. Sometimes I would take breaks at points while income built up in the background, but I also spent plenty of time optimizing. And I don't normally enjoy grinding.
"Idle games" are one of the recent booms in gaming over the last five or so years. They now even have their own section on Kongregate and are a large mobile gaming category.
Apparently so!