a walk side by side with Doshin
February 15 2026
I woke up early today on my island. I greeted the villagers who live here as they showered me with love, then i set out to work. I had to move a bunch of trees, level a patch of land that was too irregular to build anything on (the neighbors weren't happy and had pressed me to do something about it), and grow a flower to decorate a monument in construction on the other side of the island...
... And now i can stop pretending like i'm talking about Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the famous game in which you turn a deserted island into your cute-creatures-inhabited home, one day at a time.
Doshin the Giant, unlike Animal Crossing, is a game in which i have very little direct control over what's going on. I may be a yellow, ever-smiling giant; i may be powerful enough to pick up people or houses and quite literally move mountains; by simply pressing a button, i may even be able to transform into a red evil version of myself, throwing fireballs at trees and slamming the ground into piles of rubble; but i can't build anything myself and i can't make humans do what i like. They live on their own schedule, they work on projects they dream about themselves, or they don't work at all if prefer dancing or playing hula-hoop in the afternoon sun. Which, i mean, i would do the same! Sodoru, the narrator who guides me through the game, sometimes encourages me to turn into the red giant and force them to work, but why would i? All signs tell me this is their world, not mine, and i'm not their boss, just a big guy wandering around.
As i lend a hand, or as i break everything, people's love, or hate, towards me makes me bigger. As i get bigger, i get in turn more powerful, able to help more efficiently, or to throw even larger fireballs at people's faces, and i inevitably gather their love, or hate, quicker and quicker. By the end of the day, if i've been an efficient giant, i'll be so huge my feet will be the only part of me that fit in the TV screen. My power will be immense, yes, but walking without stomping on anyone will have become incredibly cumbersome, any intent i might have put in my actions lost in my infinite clumsiness. It is time to stop playing, lest i become akin to a natural force, unable to differentiate between what's good and what's harmful. Night falls, tiny human beings gather around my toes, cheerfully waving me goodbye. And then i... go to sleep? Die? I don't know, but it doesn't seem unpleasant. Tomorrow, i'll wake up again, precisely as moderately tall as i was this morning, just as happy-looking as ever: a new day of play will start.
Day after day, I wake up anew, as if nothing had happened the day prior, ready to help and destroy and wander about. The island, however, remembers everything. Villages develop, trees eventually wither and die, people recall whether i've been naughty or nice to them, and they react accordingly. What do you mean, i was all-powerful yesterday but now people hate my guts and i have to live through the consequences of my actions, to build myself a favorable reputation all over again, one good deed at a time? I believed this game was a power fantasy, i thought i was the center of the world!
I'm not the center of the world. I'm not even the focus of the game that bears my name. I am Doshin, the giant, yet the island is only one of us two that constantly grows. I'm still just the big guy wandering around. So, if my productivity, my physical strength and the hard-earned love villagers offered me didn't get me the right to be the main character, maybe i'll chill out for a bit, maybe i'll truly make wandering around my thing.
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One of my favourite activities is going for walks in my city (the real one, made with concrete and bricks and people). I don't live in a very big city, it's large enough that every neighbourhood has a quite different vibe from the others but it's small enough that i often end up choosing among a dozen or so paths that i've defined over the years. Moreover, i'm not the type of person who enters shops if i don't have a specific idea in mind (except for bookstores, that is), so i'll usually just stroll in streets and parks, with no particular goal but to be outside for an hour or so.
When you observe, day after day, a place like a city, you end up noticing all the ways it grows and changes. Shops open and close, get replaced by new ones or emptied out; roads are temporarily closed for renovations, buildings are being built and then they get lived in, a truck accidentally hits a garbage bin that won't be restored for a few days; leaves fall from trees until they grow back, sidewalks are weeded until new plants sprout between the cracks; your favourite coffee shops offers a new beverage, there is a yard sale next door today, a new graffiti on that wall; people go to work, play, ride bikes, carry their vegetables from the market, kids run around. Sometimes, entire neighbourhoods seem to pop up in a matter of weeks! Witnessing the city live is endlessly lovely to me, so much so that i wrote a game based around exactly that kind of observation a few years ago.
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Doshin the Giant makes my mind fill up with the same kind of thoughts i get when i'm going for a walk outside. Sure, i can do much grander things as the yellow giant than as the simple chocolate-cake-loving person that i am, but either of these bodies feels to me like a gentle outsider to the places they inhabit. I walk around Doshin's island at a rather relaxed pace: if i want to visit all the villages i've been helping develop, by the time i've reached the first one again it might have grown significantly, be full of new people i haven't met yet. I'll leave behind me a handful of villagers busy with building a monument, only to return late in the afternoon to behold the sphinx statue they've created and everyone dancing merrily. If i destroy a village as the red giant of hate and don't come back for the day, i'll be surprised tomorrow to see that in my absence, it's been built anew - only this time, with spiky walls around buildings and cannons deployed as a defensive measure by the understandably traumatized locals. I started this post with a comparison with the latest Animal Crossing game, in which i, the only human on an island full of animals, am exclusively the one being capable of imposing my creativity on the land. As Doshin though, i navigate a world created in collaboration with others (and largely by them), a geography i can shape but that i have to learn again as the game goes along.
In Doshin the Giant like in any videogame, i, the person playing, am strolling through a place built by other people: game developers. Eager to please and worried about the quality of their work as they can be, they often fear that i might lose my interest if things don't happen to me now, if i'm not encouraged as soon as possible to act; but why would i be bored, if merely wandering around and taking it all in is already such a rich experience? I have always had a profound, serene time re-discovering again and again a world i think i'm getting familiar with, both in Doshin and in the real world. When i stop having productivist urges, when i notice coldly optimizing my life will not make me a better person tomorrow, i realize i am not the center of the world: i can move myself around it, and quietly be moved by its ever-shifting beauty.
