If I had to dream up a superpower for myself, it would be a no brainer: I would want the ability to control time. To be able to breeze through a few weeks of Chicago winter to get to lake weather–or pause to extend a weekend visiting my best friend who lives across the country that I only get to see once or twice a year–would be extraordinary. Don’t we all complain about how we just don’t have enough time for all the things we would like to get done in our lives? Don’t we fantasize about what it would be like to skip to the good part? Amazingly, these dreams are a reality* in a modded gameplay of Stardew Valley. The mod is called TimeSpeed and it is described on nexusmods as follows: “Control the flow of time in the game: speed it up, slow it down, or freeze it altogether. This can happen automatically or when you press a key in the game.”
Stardew’s TimeSpeed mod brings a whole new layer to the experience of gameplay. It allows you to actualize the changes to your productivity that would be made if you could alter the speed at which time passes, all within the world of Pelican Town. You get to choose what you spend your time on, and what you skip past. You would think that this brings a sense of newfound freedom to the game; you are completely in control of a realm of life that is usually an untamed force. Funnily enough, I kind of found the modded experience to add a degree of complexity, rather than to make it more simple.
There were now several other factors to consider. What aspects of the game would we deem worth spending the full time on? What would we skip? What would we be missing out on in making those decisions to speed through certain tasks or responsibilities on the farm? In a way, it might result in elements of the game feeling like chores. We could end up going through the motions instead of enjoying the cozy game for what it is.
On the other hand, it can also make the gameplay experience much more intentional. You are making an active choice to participate in those tasks that you do opt in to spend the full time on. You can take advantage of the mechanic of slowing the game down instead of speeding through.
This may seem unrelated, but bear with me – one of my favorite movies is About Time, in which the protagonist learns that he has inherited an ability that has been passed out through generations of men in his family to travel back in time to past moments of his life. He spends a lot of the course of the film giving himself “do-overs” – going back to make a more striking impression on a pretty girl, rewinding time to help his friend with a work disaster, etc. His dad – who shares this power – tells him the secret to a happy life: at the end of each day, he goes back in time and relives it, start to finish, making sure to pay attention to all of the little things that make life so wonderful. It makes him appreciate all the things that he might have not noticed the first time around. At the end of the film, the protagonist comes to a realization: he doesn’t have to relive every single day to appreciate the beauty of it; instead, he sets the intention to notice it the first time around.
I would connect this to the experience of playing Stardew Valley with the TimeSpeed mod, in that contrasting the experience of going through the game in normal speed with a sped up or slowed down version gives you the perspective to make these considerations I outlined above. It gives you the space to stop and enjoy aspects of the game for the sheer joy of it. When I started playing without TimeSpeed after first trying out the mod, I found the slow pace to be incredibly calming and – if you can believe it – even MORE cozy than ever.
*a virtual reality, I suppose, to be more precise.
