In Stardew Valley, a player is dipped into the farm game pond as a character who has just acquired a plot of land as part of their inheritance from their grandfather. They are then led down a journey of growth, love, and character development with a cottage-core-comfy-cozy land-tilling self-governing “real” community; one that teaches lessons of time management and interpersonal appreciation on a hyper-parasocial interface; and one that completely relies on the player’s relationship with their character, and their subsequent relationship with the Pelican Town community. While Stardew Valley does not claim to be a social justice haven of intersectionality and representation, it has become associated with the farm game/cozy game aesthetic, one that has continuously attracted audiences wanting to be free of constraining social norms, especially, I argue, racial structures in every capacity, whether they be antagonizing, passive or supportive. As such, I argue that Stardew Valley, more specifically ConcernedApe, by only including 2 obviously Black characters and one blue-hued character with a Chinese last name, exemplifies key concepts of critical race theory, most notably differential racialization and interest convergence. In presenting these concepts, the game perpetuates particularly liberal notions of racism through flat characterization, underrepresentation and the storyline’s connection to Marxist notions of commodity fetishism and Black slavery.
Before delving into the argument more fully, I wanted to poll the internet to see if there were criticisms of Stardew Valley and its particularly pale cast, and found myself on this Reddit thread. For concision’s sake, OP was expressing concern and frustration with the lack of BIPOC characters, especially given the presence of wizards, dwarves and friendly monster roommates. They were met with some comforting comments, some “shut up, SJW” comments, and one comment I think to be particularly salient:
And, honestly, what a great point. Why do I need my life and race validated by something like a video game? We’ve got bigger fish to fry! World peace and wage slavery are what we should be focusing our time and energy on, not some fun little pastime that represents nothing about the Real World™. However, this claim is easier to make (if you’re a white person) when 37 characters in the game represent various iterations and styles of whiteness, and maybe 3 characters that are socially acceptable iterations of racial ambiguity and non-whiteness. When space is made for you consistently, you don’t feel the effects of having to search for a seat, which is figuratively what this argument is founded on: BIPOC shouldn’t have to ask, search, scratch and plead for digital media representation in games, and we shouldn’t have to make our own homogenized spaces and platforms for solace and true consideration when developers could just, like, talk to BIPOC, take notice of the world they live in and realize that our world is not post-racial, nor is it majority white with sprinkles of color for flavor and experience.
In this post, I’ll discuss three characteristics of Stardew Valley that perpetuate white normality through the lens of Critical Race theory and the Marxist “commodity fetishism” theory. I will argue that the premise of the game is founded by an idealistic “inheritance story,” which I posit is a story in which the player acquires land or structures that further their exploration within the game. The story fundamentally rejects a specific and common Black experience given historical and current economic barriers for wealth-building for Blacks in America. I will also talk about character development, specifically related to femme “marriable” characters and the discrepancy between their backstories. This relates to “differential racialization,” a key tenet of CRT that you can read about here, and faux-inclusionary practices for economically prosperous ends. Lastly, I’ll discuss more subjective ideas of optics and representation through avatars that psychologically reinforce ideas of white normality.
The inheritance story is a story in which a character or player’s gameplay/trajectory is prompted by an inheritance or will of some sort that drastically changes their “normal” life. In Stardew Valley, the player is thrust into a world in which their avatar’s life is changed by their grandfather’s death and their subsequent acquisition of a plot of land, a house and some coins. Lovely premise, I love tilling and tapping in farm games!
However, historically, due to scams and oversights within/by the American government system, Blacks have had a difficult time acquiring land and accumulating wealth, which can be exemplified by this Federal Reserve research done in 2019, showing that:
This research, coupled with the fact that I, nor has any Black person I know (intimately and financially) received an inheritance. This could likely be due to simply not hearing the term when family members passed, it being characterized in ways I couldn’t recognize, or a plethora of other reasons, but I think even that says something worth considering: the fact that I (this may be an assumption) and other Blacks don’t have tangible relationships to inheritances although their popularity in narrative forms of media has such a wide scope is an example of white normality.
This is the first example of black invalidation; although some white people don’t have context for inheritances, the foundations of this are completely different than for black people. Black people experience pervading and systemic forms of racism, both financially and narratively; white people can only experience it financially (even this is underlined by different circumstances). The economic structures of the US government pertaining to land acquisition and inheritance place black people at a consistent disdavantage. To have this as the basis for an RPG immediately places limitations on the imagination of the player, regardless of race. However, when coupled with this insight, which for Blacks is almost embedded within our genetic code, these limitations are further exacerbated, as the role being played is largely inapplicable to Black folks.
If we move past this and get into the real cozy bits of the game pertaining to mechanisms of gameplay, something as simple as “growing flowers” can quickly become something akin to “land-tilling for commodity acquisition, which is then used to facilitate interpersonal communication”, in which case we still find ourselves in a vaguely racist paradigm. I say this for two reasons:
- One romanceable character is Black and she is woefully underdeveloped.
Maru is one of the six possible marriable femme characters. On the Wiki pages for each of these characters, their avatars are accompanied by a short blurb that is meant to entice the player into pursuing a relationship with them. Penny quietly tends things, Emily is working to make ends meet, and Abigail’s parents just don’t get her. Maru, however, is friendly, outgoing and ambitious. What a great catch, right? But what does this say about Maru? What are her concerns? Her insecurities? Who is Maru? We know that the other characters are “people” because of their trials and tribulations, but Maru has none. Does this render her a “happy-go-lucky” mixed-girl who likes to nurse people to health and fiddle with her little gadgets, or an under-considered Flat Stanley inserted into the game so as to show that ConcernedApe and his gaming community aren’t racist, or just an under-considered Flat Stanley inserted into the game for a broader financial appeal? The game is $4.99 on the US app store – imagine how much money would be lost in 2020 if ConcernedApe didn’t include #2, which is outlined below.
- While there are 6/24 possibly melanated skin-tone options, 4/56 hairstyles (on iOS) are textured for Black people.
I can admit that melanation (brownness/blackness) making up 25% of a video game’s allotted skin color spectrum is impressive. What is particularly concerning is how skin color is where the acknowledgement of Black non-homogeneity ends. My hair type is not the same as my best friend’s hair type which is not the same as her mom’s hair type which is not the same as her aunt’s hair type. Given the small scope of these examples, how can Black hair be generalized and effectively represented by 4 different hairstyles, 2 of which are actually distinctive (the other two are high-top fades and low-top fades (of which I have neither (accessibility!)).
This is where the concept of “interest convergence” comes into play. This concept exemplifies how Black significance and liberation efforts will be cherry-picked by white folks for their personal socioeconomic/political gain. This is not to say that white folks don’t care, they are just selective about it. We’re all selective about things, but being selective about what we share with a new friend over coffee is different from being selective about caring about a marginalized group’s humanity and representation. Seldom will you see a Black television show without white folks in it, because the world doesn’t not have white folks in it, but in some white media, there is a blurring, and sometimes an erasure, of BIPOC. Stardew Valley’s lack of texture diversity but inclusion of one Black “object of affection” is largely for economic gain, as exemplified by the lack of character development and design of Maru, as well as how these two things manifest as part of her character.
Maru started ambiguous, became phenotypically ‘blacker’ – textured, thick hair/wider nose/darker skin, then landed at the intersection of ambiguous and Black: mixed. By presenting her as mixed, with a Black father and a white mother (step-parent), she becomes more palatable to white folks and more forcibly relatable to the homogenous mass of Black people that this character is sneakily meant to appeal to. ConcernedApe and the broader gaming community will not say, “Maru is meant to appeal to our conception of what should be a clean and comfortable homogenous Black race, with her short silky hair, small nose and small lips,” but they will show it, which is arguably more important in the grand scheme of black visibility. This filtering of Black identities to a single representative more effectively shows how Blacks have been, and likely will continue to be, reduced to a caricature or image, one idealized by white folks for mass consumption.
This, as Marx puts it, is commodity fetishism, as it reduces Black humanity to a digital archetype, a binary value, one that can be molded and morphed however white folks choose, so as to instigate their financial gain and growth. The “Black” character is so simple, yet so complex, creating a sort of playground for developers because it is endlessly customizable, whereas white characters and their typical storylines become overused, overrepresented, and oversaturated in the gaming market. The “Black” character is a peripheral character, a “differential,” in comparison to its non-Black counterparts, and it is used as a drop of intersectionality, like that one Black girl in that one TV show you used to love.
In applying a lens influenced by critical race theory, players can more effectively identify their own underlying racial undertones, as well as understand how microaggressive consistency through harmful racial generalizations for financial ends (Maru’s purpose) and salient race-based inapplicability (inheritance stories), perpetuates Black subjugation through liberal conceptions of intersectionality. Instead of just putting just any Black character in the gameplay for the sake of optics (we can tell), why not develop a considered and well-represented Black character? It can’t be that hard, right?
