When thinking of Stardew valley, there’s more than one single way to play. Whether it be focusing on activities like mining and fishing, farming crops and raising animals, or doing your best to spread out your time evenly into all of these, the player can always control where they devote their time to and where they set their goals. Stardew’s story begins with the main character receiving a letter from his grandfather that he is instructed to only open when they “feel crushed by the burden of modern life”, and this letter turns out to be an escape from his office job and the opportunity to “make connections with others and nature”. However, what seems to be a true motivator both for Stardew’s creation and its success is closely tied to the Idea of control and consequence. By turning to Slavoj Zizek and his conception of Ideology, we can see how the love for games like Stardew Valley are heavily influenced by the schism between Political and Economic Ideologies unconsciously held by a majority of the US population and the material reality of their daily lives. Stardew Valley is a game where you vicariously live out your dreams of escaping the monotonous and chaotic life of working for big corporations and reclaiming agency, with skills to explore and the opportunity to harvest the fruits of your labor (pun intended). When it comes to the real-life of many people in the U.S, it seems like everything around you is under the sway of a large power invisible to you, and the decisions you make are almost completely inconsequential when looking at the bigger picture. When public opinion has no correlation with what bills pass in congress, the wealth and success of technical advancement are being hoarded at the top and the stock market can skyrocket when the average citizen is facing the worst economic and medical situation possible due to a pandemic, the neoliberal claims that the “free market” allows anyone to succeed seems in possible. Having then, the opportunity to choose what to do, and having your life in your hands with endless possibilities feeds the craving many people have for a semblance of control. However, it’s not valuable or correct in my opinion to view Stardew valley and other games like this only as a social anesthetic or supplement for the lack of real progress. Stardew itself is evidence that a passion can lead to great success, Since it’s creator worked alone and tirelessly for years to create a game that accomplished what he believed Harvest Moon could have done, and managed to this project into a great success, paralleling the protagonist of Stardew Valley in escaping the pit of corporate work without control and becoming the one with control over his life. Also, turning to the Stardew community and seeing the millions of connections formed and modifications made for the game with missions of their own allows you to see that games like these often inspire those who care to also manifest their agency and be part of something valuable themselves. This is also not something that is unique to Stardew, as similar games such as Minecraft, which were originally also single-player sandbox games developed robust passionate communities which took it upon themselves to advance and develop the game in countless ways.
Now, the value of games like these that hand the reins to the player and seeing the value that they receive from being able to independently create success however they define it in their world as well as forming communities to contribute to those products they love lies in the fact that it aligns well with those neoliberal and democratic Ideologies that many (often unconsciously) hold as truth, but In reality, are only at play in “low stakes” situations such as these. In that case, how can games like Stardew valley help in allowing the user to understand the control these Ideologies hold on them? How can the true nature of America’s capitalist, oligarchical, imperial regime be portrayed not as a reality which must be escaped from or a system in which passion dedication will allow for success, but as a game that’s rigged against the player, and an unjust system that must be destroyed? Communities for these games have success in advocating and even creating improvements or changes for the worlds they love, but how can this be harnessed to face the much harder challenge of fostering change within a game that doesn’t want you to win?
