The Subtly Brilliant Design of Balloons in Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Rewarding Players for Playing the Game

In Animal Crossing: New Horizons, there are balloons carrying presents that occasionally drift over the player’s island, and the player can shoot these balloons with a slingshot to retrieve their loot. The present-laden balloon is a small yet masterfully designed feature that gently pushes players to engage with most major features of the game.

The simple beauty of the balloons is that they reward the player for actively playing the game. Balloons spawn over the ocean, then slowly drift over the player’s island from one side to the other. The exact location where balloons spawn is random, and the times that they spawn appears to be random from the player’s perspective.

What this means is there is no efficient way for a player to farm balloons. Realistically, players will only find balloons if they are paying close enough attention to their surroundings while doing other business about their island. As most of the gameplay in AC:NH involves outdoor activities such as gardening, fishing, bug catching, or chopping wood, the balloons provide a small but significant extra motivation for players to go about these outdoor activities.

Making Players Earn Their Rewards

Rewarding players for actively engaging with the game is great, but an equally important part of the design of the balloons is that players must track down and pop the balloons themselves. This introduces a spontaneous sort of minigame that typically goes something like this:

1. While going about outdoor activities, the player discovers a balloon. They may have spotted it directly in the sky, they may have seen its shadow on the ground, or they may have heard the sound of rushing air overhead.
2. The player chases down the balloon, using their vaulting pole and ladder to overcome the natural obstacles of the landscape on the way.
3. The player finds a safe landing spot that is not over a river or in a location that is so crowded with ground cover that the present will disappear after falling.
4. The player lines up a shot with their slingshot and pops the balloon, dropping the present.

This minigame is so easy that there is virtually no chance that a player who has spotted a balloon will not be able to get the present. Even so, the minigame is exciting to play, and it makes the player feel like they earned their reward.

Imagine another possible implementation of these balloons: while players are going about outdoor activities on the island, balloons randomly spawn just off screen at the player’s head level, and by walking underneath the balloon, the player retrieves the present. No chase or slingshot necessary.

From the economics perspective of how frequently the player receives presents, this new system can be tuned to be virtually equivalent to the existing system. However, this doesn’t feel nearly as satisfying for the player: in their mind, it feels like the player is just being handed presents at random. This new system lacks the inherent excitement of hunting balloons. Also, this new system theoretically encourages players to partake in the same outdoor activities, but it in fact has the negative effect of encouraging players to be lazy and stand around until a balloon appears near them.

Ultimately, what this means is that the balloon system cannot be viewed in isolation simply as a mechanic to give gifts to players. It is a finely tuned component of the whole game that serves to engage the player with the rest of the game activities, and it rewards them for playing the way the game designers intended.