I was already aware of the existence of the infamous Stardew Valley Wiki before purchasing this game on my Nintendo Switch and starting my own farm. After creating my character, Linlin, and finally throwing myself into the world of Stardew Valley, I made the decision that I would simply enjoy the game, play it casually, and not look at the wiki. It was probably one of the most resolute choice I made when it comes to video games.
I broke this promise and fell into the wiki’s arms exactly twelve in-game days into my journey in Stardew Valley. After my character, Linlin, woke up from bed early in the morning at 6 a.m., I found a letter from Mayor Lewis in the mailbox: there would be an Egg Festival in the town square on the following day, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. “You wouldn’t want to miss the annual egg hunt!” Mayor Lewis concluded his letter enthusiastically. As I was reading Lewis’ letter, I was suddenly hit with a slight sense of anxiety: I knew nothing about either the festival or the egg hunt, and I had no clue on how to prepare for it. The demon of wiki, at this moment, crawled into my mind. Yes! If I go and check the omniscient Stardew Valley Wiki – it would tell me everything I would need to know to prepare for the festival, so that I could get the most out of it.
With this mindset, I embarked on an enduring and persistent relationship with Stardew Valley Wiki. I gained a lot from this relationship: the straw hat that looks really well on Linlin’s head; the extreme profits I yielded from my strawberry crops – if I hadn’t fired up the wiki on the day before the festival, I would have spent the 3,000g fortune I amassed on other seeds, instead of waiting presciently for the festival and spending them all on strawberries. In a similar fashion, I used the wiki before I descended down the mines; I used wiki to help me catch sturgeons in the summer so that I could please the governor during the Luau festival; wiki helped me find Robin’s axe, discover the Secret Woods, and win Penny’s heart by giving her melons and emeralds all the time.
Who needs to gradually discover the social dynamics and preferences of everyone in Pelican Town on their own when we have this at our disposal?
The world of Stardew Valley came to become shrouded in wintry snow, and on the first day of winter I ran into a shadowy figure that, upon seeing me, hurriedly ran away. With a quest asking me to investigate popping up in my journal, I almost instinctively launched the wiki. I was not disappointed. I was told exactly what to do, and the figure that was hiding in a bush gave me a magnifying glass that allowed me to discover secret notes. Lucky as I was, the first note popped up almost immediately as I went to the quarry and mined a piece of stone. The note turned out to be a piece from Sam’s holiday shopping list, detailing the favorites of his parents and his friends.
This was an epiphanic moment for me. This, I realized, is the way in which Stardew Valley is originally intended and designed to be played. I learn of what other people like not through the wiki, but through finding these notes and actually talking to them; I should be finding out about the festivals and the mini-games not by reading a website but by playing through them and experiencing them. My play should be centered around my mind, my ideas, instead of some external influence that is not a part of the game in the first place.
This is how I was supposed to find out what Penny likes. Not the wiki.
At its core, Stardew Valley is a rich possibility space – it gives the player a world at the disposal of their imagination and creativity, of their problem-solving acuteness. The wiki takes away this sense of creativity and free-choice. As the wiki dictates what crops I should plant for maximum profit and drags me through item quests, holding my hand and leading me through Stardew Valley, this fundamentally anti-procedualistic element of the game is lost to my play. When I wanted to plant corn and have a large cornfield just like the one in the film Interstellar, and gave up on the idea because the wiki told me it was not the most profitable and there are “better” options, it was no longer me who was giving meaning to my farm, to my experience of playing the game.
This is how I came to know how to actually play Stardew Valley. The wiki reminds me of the nymphs in Greek mythology: they lure the sailors towards them with promises of beauty and their elegant chants, and it would be too late for the sailors to discover the true nature of these creatures, before being enchanted by it and lured into its trap. I am confident, nonetheless, that I would better resist the urge of going to the wiki again, knowing how it destroys the centrality of my play in relationship to the game, greatly eroding it if not substituting it entirely. After all, Stardew Valley was designed to be played by us, experienced by us, and understood by us.
