Stardew Valley is a game that allows a player to pursue a capitalist fantasy, but doesn’t reflect the associated costs and externalities that come with unfettered capitalist production.
Stardew Valley is a game with limitless production potential. This is certainly a major draw of the game for me. Personally, I don’t feel like I’m playing a production game properly without making a couple of spreadsheets and optimizing farming patterns. (to be honest, I was surprised in class the game was in the ‘cozy game’ genre and not the ‘farming/production game’ genre but I digress.) As other blogs have mentioned, while the introduction of Stardew Valley is pitched as an escape from the modern nine to five capitalist grind, the game relies on achieving a high level of production with end-game equipment and resources. The main character in Stardew Valley is not someone looking for a leisurely fishing and gardening retreat, rather an entrepreneur ready to conquer the world. The player goes from farming by hand to earn enough money and resources to purchase the equipment and capital to reduce the amount of work the player has to do and allows them to increase their profits. The game also encourages the player to pursue marriage to obtain an additional worker for the farm. But like many corporations of our day, the player can get lost in their exponentially growing profits and resources and forget one critical component: waste.
One of the biggest problems the world is facing is pollution, the byproduct of production. We are facing pollution in many different ways, from climate change as a result of greenhouse gasses, to billions of plastics in our oceans. In Stardew Valley we wouldn’t expect to have any greenhouse effects from our production, as global warming is the result of entire planets worth of production for hundreds of years. However, we would expect an individual farmer to produce a fair amount of waste, from dead crops to animal carcasses items that no longer fit in the player’s inventory. I know that whenever I run out of inventory space, I just drop my items on the ground and leave them knowing they will be gone when I get back or I put them in my magic trashcan that can delete an infinite amount of garbage with no repercussions.
There is trash in the game of Stardew, both as a quest to clean it up as well as a bad drop while fishing. But this trash is either useful (can be trashed for stone) or a one time object of questing. The only worthless trash is jojocola cans but that is because jojomart is the primary ‘villain’ of this game.
While this is certainly an idyllic situation, trash is certainly a major problem and it is important to acknowledge the effects of production. This is actually a common observation in some other factory/production games, namely Satisfactory as well. But as we know trash is no fun and it certainly makes sense that a for-fun video game would include something that only slows down the game. We can certainly enjoy the game sans-garbage, but it’s important to acknowledge that even the good guys have wasted.
A trash can that allows the user to obtain 60% of the value of their garbage
