Choose one of the twelve single villagers. Once you find your romantic interest, go through the list of objects that he or she loves, likes, and dislikes. Spend the next coming weeks on showering your target with objects of ‘love’ and ‘like,’ while avoiding any of the ‘dislikes.’ Once you achieve a total of eight ‘hearts’ from your target, buy a bouquet and propose a marriage. Once you get married, proceed with your wedding ceremony and decide if you would like to have a child. At that point, you will have a spouse and a child who can help you with your chores and farm work. That’s it, you’ve made it — you started your own family in Stardew Valley.
If you are wondering how one’s pursuit of love and a formation of a family can be as simple as a brief summary of only a couple sentences, you are asking the right question. While the premise of the game lies in cultivating a life of a farmer, both in regards to the NPC’s personal, social, and work life, the depiction of the characters’ romantic relationships in the game fails to fully encapsulate the complexities of those in the real world.
One main reason is that interpersonal relationships in the game are strictly transactional. A character can only proceed with developing relationships with others upon bestowing tangible gifts with monetary or materialistic values, which are later translated into the number of ‘hearts’ added to the level of your engagement with other villagers. However, the nature of human relationships in reality is never — and should not be — transactional, but is rather highly nuanced, involving multiple, subtle layers of emotional exchanges.
Such a transactional nature of relationships in the game directs us to question why we are inclined to consider the number of material transactions as the primary means to gauge one’s level of engagement with others. While it is understandable that game developers needed to identify a metric that could quantify the NPC’s relationships, which are unquantifiable in real life, we still need to critically examine why “tangible gifts” were determined as the metric, out of many other alternatives. Perhaps, it is the prevalence of materialism in the capitalist society we live in that encourages us to equate material gift to a primary determinant of one’s likeliness.
At the same time, the fact that there is only a single path to follow to pursue a relationship and start a family in the game prevents the players from recognizing non-traditional forms of affection and marriage in real life. In addition to the majority of the populations who engage with traditional forms of marriages, there are individuals who openly accept and engage with non-traditional forms of romantic partnerships such as open relationship or marriage, polygamy, and covenant marriage. The lack of choices for the players to decide on the specific forms of relationships they would like their characters to engage with others alienates those who do not identify by the prevalent norms of love and affection.
However, despite the game’s inability to draw a fuller picture of the nature of relationships and family in real life, it is still worth to acknowledge that the game has put in a noticeable effort to remain inclusive for individuals from the LGBTQ+ communities. Released in 2016, a time at which conversations on LGBTQ+ were on a strong rise in the mainstream, the game addresses some of the status quo by allowing the characters’ gay marriage, which is quite unusual for games of a similar objective, especially those produced in non-Western countries that are yet to be open to non-traditional forms of marriages.
