Animal Crossing's massive popularity has made it less like paradise and more like Wall Street

With hours of extra time on their hands because of social distancing and quarantine, new players to Nintendo's "Animal Crossing: New Horizons" like Ash Wolf, also known on Twitter as Ninji, have been drawn to the slow, laid-back life simulator that allows them to build idyllic islands, decorate their homes, visit friends and more. "People are using this as a sort of escape," Wolf said. "I joked when I first got the game that it was literally the only thing giving me structure in my life." But this influx of new users produced an unexpected evolution, recalibrating the game's serene speed to a fast-paced hustle one player compared to Wall Street. Animal Crossing isn't designed for such gameplay -- in fact, it purposefully slows players down by design. Yet the game's community became obsessed with optimization, in the process exploiting features meant to encourage day-by-day progress. Now, they've become a dominant part of the audience, finding loopholes or strategies to get rich fast.