In one of my first non-player character interactions within Stardew Valley, a line of dialogue from Emily encouraging me to pursue eco-friendly farming caught my attention. This interaction led me to believe that the game’s mechanics would push me towards sustainable practices by limiting finite natural resources such as wood, fish, and ore.
“I hope you’re farming in a sustainable way. The valley’s ecosystem is fragile!” – Emily
However, I soon came to the realization that this would not be the case. Trees grew back freely over time, fish were plentiful in any of the available major bodies of water, and the mine’s stone and ore regenerated daily regardless of my previous expeditions. By deepening my understanding of these initial game mechanics, I found myself struggling to understand why the game would push me to act environmentally conscious without providing me with a definitive reason to do so.
In fact, the game does the opposite: unsustainable ecological practices such as deforestation, mining, and overfishing are all tolerated and even encouraged by a game design that promotes capitalist objectives over the conservation of nature. In the world of Stardew Valley, the player accesses an unlimited wealth of natural resources in order to sustain economical, agricultural, industrial, and urban development. This development makes up the majority of player action within the game, as the player works to accrue money, ore, and building material to improve one’s tools, business, and living conditions. However, in the real world, Earth can only supply us with finite resources, which when harvested can wreak irreversible ecological consequences such as loss of ecosystem, biodiversity, and habitats, as well as pollution and global warming.
Stardew Valley may not be the only game that suffers from underlying problematic game design. In the article The Pokémon Dilemma, Cody Wiesner breaks down the “cognitive dissonance” present in how Pokémon games promote a love for animals and nature while simultaneously employing game design that arguably depicts animal abuse. Instead of attempting to rework themes of animal abuse, Pokémon developers attempt to quash concerns by insisting that the enslaved creatures in their games are willing and loving participants of the ferocious and barbaric brawls that they are forced to participate in. Despite the irrationality of this idea, the animal-creature-fighting format of gameplay still remains core to the identity of Pokémon, as removing Pokémon fights from the game would take away an exciting feature of a game that many have already come to know and love.
Pokémon gameplay depicting combat that lasts until a Pokémon “faints”
Similarly, Stardew Valley is a game that revolves around harvestation of resources in order to achieve one’s dreams. What Stardew Valley fails to address is that historically, this approach has come at the expense of a wide variety of natural ecosystems and the species that inhabit them. Instead of finding ways to allow players to preserve nature within the game, Stardew Valley disregards these issues entirely: animals are rarely even depicted throughout the game, save for the passing squirrel or the pet cat/dog that slinks around the player’s farm and living space. Natural resources are infinite, removing any moral dilemma on behalf of the player as to whether one should harvest, mine, or fish. Delving deeper, one finds that the simplicity of eliminating unwanted material by dragging items into a trash icon serves in stark contrast to the harsh reality of the modern waste crisis.
The willingness of games such as Stardew Valley and Pokémon to sweep these problematic topics under the rug can be attributed to a favoring of more simple and engaging game design. However, I would argue that the nature of these games speaks to an anthropocentric perspective regarding characters within games. After all, video games are made for humans, and in modern video games we play characters that are human. Thus, in a fantasy game that is fundamentally based around a human player/character, why shouldn’t all Pokémon love and adore their human masters? Why shouldn’t the world of Stardew Valley be able to supply the player with all of the wood and fish and copper that one needs for economic and industrial advancement? In a video game that deviates and remains separate from reality, this ideology may not be all that troublesome. However, when extended to the real world, such a viewpoint can lead humans toward self-serving actions that end up harming the life present around us.
References:
Wiesner, Cody. “The Pokémon Dilemma.” Medium, SUPERJUMP, 25 Nov. 2020, https://superjumpmagazine.com/the-pok%C3%A9mon-dilemma-e28d5c6b5105.
