In Aubrey Anable’s book Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Affect, the author brings up the concept of affects, a psychological concept first came up by Silvan Tomkin. According to Tomkin, affects refer to the aspect of emotions, feelings, and bodily engagement people have; yet affects can only be attained at the interface, namely at the moment of transmission or contact. In other words, affects exist yet can hardly be articulated, and they exceed what individual can know or express by themselves. The only way to perceive affects is through an interface. Video games, as clearly pointed out early on in the book, provide this interface for people to grasp and understand affects.
Therefore, Tomkin’s theory on affects actually provides an indirect method to study ourselves. One has to start with the interface, which serves as a medium, to grasp the affects that escape their own attention. In this blog post, I employ this method to learn about my own affects through the interface Stardew Valley. I would ask questions to introspect myself, such as what I enjoyed about this game and how I played this game. With this careful self-introspection and close reading of this game, I wish to see my affects that have long existed yet only reveal themselves in this virtual setting. By employing this method, I hope to better understand my own feelings in the real world and explore Stardew Valley’s game design that facilitates this revelation of affects.
Unlike other players, I am especially slow in my progress in the game Stardew Valley. With no ambitious goals to build large houses or make tons of money, I spent most of my time cutting grass and chopping woods, or even just doing nothing and seeing my avatar purposelessly wandering around. Even though the game would hint new tasks every time my avatar checks her mailbox, it is totally up to the players to decide if they want to finish them, and the game accepts whatever decisions players make and continues itself. Hence, finishing tasks or making money becomes an option to the players, and they get full agency in planning out every day in the game. Observing myself through the lens of Tomkin’s theory, I came to see the intense affects deep in my mind that only got revealed when I played this game. In a world where one is expected to maximize their potential in face of massive amounts of work, I have always been asked to increase my efficiency and strive to become more productive. Stardew Valley provides a safe space to release my stress, and it becomes an interface to show my hidden affects—my resistance to overdriving myself and my despisal to the dogma that asks people to be useful to the society. Stardew Valley, through its flexible operational logic, minimizes the interference of the game on the players’ conversation with themselves. Without any hardline rules, Stardew Valley gives players a valuable opportunity to have agency over themselves, to decide for themselves what they want to get out of this game experience. Essentially, this game’s flexible operational logic makes it an especially suitable interface to reveal one’s affects.
Just like what Anable comments in his book, “the video game screen as a material surface, a space of representation, and as part of an affective assemblage is a site of everyday intimacy and entanglement (59).” By having a close reading of our behaviors in playing video games, we more broadly glimpse the interrelationship between labor and leisure and become clearer of our own embedded emotion to life. Stardew Valley creates a small, imaginary world, but it also serves as a mirror to reflect the larger world in reality. People come to this game with different purposes. By using video games as an interface to study one’s affects, we hope to better see the way we treat ourselves, the problems we might have encountered in life and make changes accordingly. Videogames can and should go beyond being an escape from problems in life—rather, they point to a direction for us to tackle these problems and embrace life more wholeheartedly.
Reference:
Aubrey Anable. Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Affect. JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. 2020;59(2):175. Accessed January 28, 2022.
