In Voltaire's 1759 Candide, the title character after many adventures and tribulations concludes that happiness is a matter of cultivating your garden rather than seeking fortune and glory, an echo of unheeded advice to Roman politician Cicero by his friend Atticus. Candide's erstwhile mentor Dr Pangloss, more generally known for pronouncement that we live in the best of all possible worlds, endorses that sentiment in claiming that ‘when man was put into the garden of Eden, it was with an intent to dress it: and this proves that man was not born to be idle’.

Preceding chapters have suggested that Animal Crossing as a virtual garden and a small virtual world (an archipelago of private islands in cyberspace where there are rules, social interaction, a simulated natural environment and a built environment) rewards those players who in rejecting idleness engage in what might be characterised as cultivation: selection, placement, display, harvesting and enhancement for pleasure or as the basis for greater capability in world making.

The activity of players might instead be characterised as a matter of curation. Critic Jens Hoffmann comments that:

Hoffmann's characterisation offers several perspectives for understanding the game as a source of pleasure and New Horizons as a simulation of an economy: sufficiently real to be engaging but not so real as to generate the inequalities, exploitation, aggression, unhappiness and contestation evident in all real-life economies.

Animal Crossing is a commercial product from a corporation with global scale, intended to provide Nintendo with a superior return on investment, one greater than the returns from savings accounts during periods when Japanese interest (and national growth) rates were very low following the collapse of the property bubble. As preceding paragraphs have suggested, the New Horizons business model is a matter of persuading people to recurrently engage in curation. Buy the game, play the game, pay subscription fees and buy amiibo or other collectables.

All cultural production – whether a matter of manufacturing (artisanal or industrial) or performance – is grounded. It might be attractive to people across the world and across time, whether for innate qualities or because it is recognised as a valued commodity. However, it has a physical and institutional basis: a location within one or more jurisdictions (national and/ or provincial legal systems) with social norms and enforceable rules about activity, irrespective of whether it is perceived as ‘disembodiment’ in a globally networked virtual world. It also has a genealogy – a point of origin, adaptation and reception over time – and may have an aura, perceptions that it is unique or otherwise valuable rather than so omnipresent and so functional as to be unrecognised.

Animal Crossing is a virtual world in which the interaction between live humans and digital characters is online but, like all virtual worlds, the game is tethered to the real world of capital, national/international law and past practice. That world can be considered simply and persuasively as a matter of delight or entertainment, without reference to the scholarship noted in preceding pages of this book. It can however be contextualised by considering its owners – how it came about – and its users and observers, in other words its audiences and critics, theorists or financial analysts who write about it. In understanding Animal Crossing as a large-scale commercial game, an artificial paradise that is a manifestation of corporate decisionmaking rather than a freak of nature, we can start by looking at that world's creator: Nintendo.

That consideration is analogous to exploring paintings, novels, operas and symphonies by looking at the creators (some market oriented, others not; some self-consciously avant-garde, others more conservative), intermediaries and consumers (some of whom, for example, sought visual aids for religious devotion and others, centuries later, engaged in status competition through purchase and gifting to museums or sought to satisfy a deep-seated hunger through amassing objects).

This chapter accordingly considers Animal Crossing as a matter of genealogies and materiality: where the virtual world came from, where does it fit in the spectrum of immersive online games, who are the gamers and why do they play.

In 1996, US provocateur John Perry Barlow, in his 1996 ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, announced

Nicholas Negroponte equally colourfully forecast that the nation state would shortly evaporate like a mothball left in the sun, something at odds with experience in 2022 and recognition that states are useful for provision of welfare, biosecurity, consumer protection, utilities and other purposes. This book began by describing New Horizons in terms of an archipelago of islands within a virtual world. The existence and operation of that world involve a range of law, some embodied within each island (and internalised by players in ways that they might not recognise) and some functioning as a legal framework around the game. That law demonstrates the problematical nature of claims by Barlow and Negroponte, in particular because the players and owners of the game (just like the physical infrastructure enabling the game) are located in terra firma and thus susceptible to enforcement action by nation states or private entities endorse by those states. This chapter offers a high level of some of that law and its implications.

Not so long ago, before the age of Trump, Professor Gautam Mukunda's mentor asked him why so many crazy people run countries (Mukunda 2012). The answer gave rise to a brilliant book called Indispensable. I will have much more to say about that later. In the meantime, we are exploring a new field of research called “heroism science,” a term apparently coined three years after Mukunda's book appeared (Allison 1, 2015). Much of the scholarship in this area has been gloomy. For instance, psychologists Paul Babiak and Robert Hare produced startling statistics about mental illness in the executive suite in their book Snakes in Suits. They found that 3.5 percent of the 200 executives they studied were psychopaths, compared to just 1 percent of the general population (Babiak 2006). As if that statistic weren't scary enough, they argue that psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism form a “dark triad” in the corporate world. Unfortunately, many compromised leaders have ample charisma, which intensifies their impact and perhaps hides their faults (Mukunda 2012).

In this book, we have approached the hero (and her or his journey) from a hybrid perspective, on a spectrum from scoundrel to saint, with a dynamic outlook. We regard heroism not just as a personal characteristic, but as a series of actions in given situations and contexts. This is what makes “hybrid heroism” so fascinating, part of a tradition harking back to the story of Lucifer, the lapsed angel turned avenger. Instead of alternating between good and evil, the hybrid hero moves along a continuum between the extremes.

Storytellers have long understood the vast appeal of these warring opposites. Alfred Hitchcock believed that strong villains made strong movies (Stone 2019). Indeed, rogues and heroes often compose “opposing sides of the same story” (Gölz 2019, 27). In fact, we as audiences can experience fear and pleas-ure simultaneously, a phenomenon known as “co-activation,” which explains the seemingly inexplicable appeal of horror (Stone 2019). Even mass marketer Disney exploits these contradictory sensations: witness the company's public relations campaign in Japan with the slogan “Welcome to the world of delightful villains” (Prusa 2016, 2).

This chapter focuses on the transition process, called the Expert Transition Cycle, which an individual goes through each time they make a transition. It reviews the more traditional models including vocational models, career anchors, psychometric models, work adjustment theories, and psychologically based models as well as ecologically and socially embedded models. It then reviews more contemporary transition process models, focusing on two models, working identity and identity status, which inform the study of identities in transition in the research. Finally, it presents the Expert Transition Cycle, which is the basis for determining how identity changes during a transition. This model includes five stages: Intention, Inquiry, Exploration, Commitment, and Integration.

The search for purpose and meaning is common to the work of many twentieth-century psychologists. It seems to operate as an overarching motivation or metamotivation for a career rather than as a specific motivation for a transition. Purpose tends to emerge and be discovered, whereas meaning is a constructed system of beliefs that is built over time around the search for purpose. Choices that lead to the discovery and construction of one’s “true nature” or “authentic self” or “essential identity” can give purpose and meaning to one’s life. The search for purpose and meaning in work is discussed in light of the retrospective interviews with twenty-four elite performers in three domains (business, sports, and music) who successfully and repeatedly transitioned to higher positions within their field.

This chapter addresses how cognitive flexibility enables an individual to respond adaptively to new situations and respond appropriately to any situation. Interrupting automaticity avoids being trapped in mindsets that foreclose generating new options; avoiding reductive bias reduces the tendency to oversimplify and turn dynamic processes into fixed objects and make complex interactions linear; avoiding functional fixedness reduces the tendency to apply the same solution to different situations; and cognitive connectivity opens up to new approaches in which mental models can be transformed, schemata reorganized, and cognitive bridges built between previous expertise and new situations. This kind of cognitive flexibility enables individuals to respond and adapt to the new situation into which they are moving. This is discussed in light of the retrospective interviews with twenty-four elite performers in three domains (business, sports, and music) who successfully and repeatedly transitioned to higher positions within their field.

This chapter focuses on three primary models for understanding motivation during transitions and addresses: (1) Expectancy × Value theory, (2) cognitive models for motivation and in particular attribution theory, locus of control, and taxonomy of perceived causes; and (3) intrinsic/extrinsic motivation theory and the self-determination model. We focus specifically on the ways in which intrinsic and extrinsic motivation influence human behavior. Individuals who are repeatedly successful in making a transition will more often demonstrate motivation intrinsically in decisions to make a transition. We examine the role of achievement motivation, need for autonomy, need for competency, search for satisfaction, and need for affiliation and relatedness as motivators for career change. They are discussed in light of the retrospective interviews with twenty-four elite performers in three domains (business, sports, and music) who successfully and repeatedly transitioned to higher positions within their field.

Historically, most intelligence theories include the personal intelligences that encompass apprehension of one’s own experience, the ability to understand and manage people, and insight into the states of other people. Intrapersonal intelligence enables an individual to cultivate self-awareness, which operates during transitions at three progressive levels. Self-knowledge is produced by reflective thinking and is the basis for growth and development. The capacity for self-assessment follows and evaluates strengths and weaknesses during a transition. This supports self-development, which turns awareness into action. Interpersonal intelligence enables an individual to empathize with others, manage relationships in mutually beneficial ways, give and receive feedback, and build collaborative relationships that develop and ultimately lead others. The personal intelligences are investigated through retrospective interviews with twenty-four elite performers in three domains (business, sports, and music) who successfully and repeatedly transitioned to higher positions within their field.