Ever wonder just how Animal Crossing characters—pieces of code, unable to comprehend complex human prose—are able to read and understand the letters you write them? James Chambers did, so he dug into the game’s code to find out.
A software security researcher—who we’ve featured before here for his work on Animal Crossing—Chambers found that your letters are given a score across seven different checks that the game performs on the letter’s content, looking for things like punctuation, repeat letters and word length.
A: Checks for punctuation at the end of sentences, and capital letters. A ‘.’, ‘?’, or ‘!’ symbol at the end of the letter grants 20 points. After that, every punctuation mark must be followed by a capital letter within 3 spaces (+10 or -10 each occurrence)
— James Chambers (@jamchamb_) August 5, 2018
C: This checks for the first (non-space) character in the letter. If it’s a capital letter, gives +20 points. If not, -10 points.
— James Chambers (@jamchamb_) August 5, 2018
E: Checks ratio of spaces to non-spaces in the letter. If it’s all spaces, or (n_spaces * 100 / n_other) is less than 20, gives -20 points. Otherwise, +20 points.
— James Chambers (@jamchamb_) August 5, 2018
G: Checks each group of 32 characters for at least one space. Deducts 20 points for each group that doesn’t have one.
— James Chambers (@jamchamb_) August 5, 2018
That’s … not the worst way for an offline video game to crunch the data.
That’s actually exactly what the animals recommend you do when you talk to them (use proper punctuation, capitals, etc.), but there’s always been a lot of mystery around how it actually works and why some letters that seem OK get bad replies (maybe they had many uncommon words).
— James Chambers (@jamchamb_) August 5, 2018
Of course, it’s far from perfect: once you know what the game’s internal rules are for letters (remember, you can get gifts from them!), you can game the system:
The first letter scored -180 points. The second scored 850. pic.twitter.com/BOV6bnkM7O
— James Chambers (@jamchamb_) August 5, 2018
I can’t believe I used to spend so much time making those letters perfect when I could have just typed A. A. A. A.
Chambers’ full thread has a lot more info and tidbits from his work, and you should definitely check it out if you want to read more on this.
Comments
2 responses to “How Animal Crossing Characters Can Read Your Letters”
This is great! I’ve been looking to find a way of checking staff news posts for campus digital signage. Such a simple rule set that covers most lazy writing and helps gamify the internal news.
I didn’t even contemplate the idea that they could possibly analyse the letters at all, so just never bothered even trying to write one (outside of the forced “missions” in the early game where they made you do it).
Pepe would be furious.