My earliest memories of gaming are of making my character wander around the map aimlessly, the Gamecube controller large and unwieldy in my tiny hands, my dad proudly commenting on my ability to complete the entire opening section of The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker on my own at the age of three or four or so, while my mom watched on slightly skeptically. In these early days, whenever my dad and I would play games together, particularly the cooperative sort, such as Lego Star Wars, he would express mild frustration at my insistence on charging ahead with what I perceived as the main plot or point of the game, refusing to stop to hunt for gold coins or collectibles.
These memories begin to blend into another very different kind of gaming, however, around the point where my dad got too busy to sit down and play video games with me and I grew more and more autonomous and unsupervised in my leisure time anyways. The games would often remain the same, particularly titles in the Legend of Zelda series, but by mid-elementary school, I had discovered the beauty of the printed video game guide. It’s difficult for me to remember playing Wind Waker as a child without bringing up the tactile association of a magazine-like game guide splayed across my bare thighs, vaguely appreciating the sort of incredibly referential humor contained in them despite understanding very few of the references, and constantly looking back and forth between my lap and the TV screen for instructions on what to do next. What might have begun as a response to a particular puzzle or boss battle I was having trouble with grew into a realization that attempting to play the game exactly as the guide told me to brought its own unique sort of pleasure. The anxiety of choice, of strategy, of saving my game regularly in case the next room was suddenly the one that would kill me off was replaced with a sort of freedom to simply enjoy the story and its presentation–a bit of a relief for a frequently anxious child.
This love of following game guides to the letter continues to inform the ways I choose to play new games. Rarely do I feel comfortable starting a game without some sort of walkthrough open in another tab–what if I miss an important conversation that reveals exclusive details about the game’s lore, or I forget to pick up some seemingly inconsequential item that becomes super useful later on? When I first started playing Stardew Valley a few years ago, partially because a close friend of mine was really into it, I unthinkingly started using the same approach: I immediately looked up “stardew valley walkthrough,” then quickly realized this was not the sort of game I could find a blow-by-blow textual instruction guide for on GameFAQs, and edited my search to something more like “stardew valley strategy for beginners.”
In these early days of playing, then, I spent little time on exploration, and still less on anything that could be truly deemed “leisure.” While the game was genuinely fun for me, my way of playing it required a such meticulous task-following that I could just imagine my friend, one of the most inventive and creative people I’ve ever met, sighing at my commitment to play the “best” game of Stardew Valley rather than “my own.” After playing this way for a few months, I realized that the difficulty curve had gotten incredibly steep. It was easy to complete the first few Community Center bundles, it was easy to make and keep a certain amount of money, but my desire to “unlock” everything in the game was clearly going to require more than just twenty Stardew Valley Wiki tabs open: it was going to take a lot of time and commitment, the kind that as a busy high schooler I wanted to spend on activities more interesting to me than watering blueberries or spending another second in the mines.
Since then, whenever Stardew Valley came to my attention, I remembered it fondly, but also as a game I had essentially “finished” for myself–I had accomplished everything in the game that had seemed both fun and easy to accomplish, and I couldn’t envision another way of playing that wouldn’t just feel redundant. When I found out about this course, however, I was immediately intrigued by the prospect of coming to the game with an academic approach. I’ve already held a longtime fascination with applying critical inquiry to media not typically considered within the purview of the ivory tower, from fanfiction to Internet memes to kid’s cartoons, so I was excited to see what could be gleaned from the analysis of Stardew as a text.
When prompted to do a close reading of Stardew, I decided that I did not want to do a close reading in tandem with the Wiki, or with any outside sources, which meant suppressing my strong urge to once again try to “maximize” my game experience by deferring to the experts and letting them make all the stressful calls for me. Rather, I tried as much as possible to do what I felt the game wanted me to do: itself an incredibly subjective approach, bringing in my own setting, personality, and half-remembered previous experience of the game as a parallel text as much as the Wiki would have been. However, this time around, I was able to notice things about the game that had completely missed my attention when I was so focused on completing discrete tasks. For example, my critical observations of the transactional nature of relationship-building that formed the basis for my previous blog post scarcely occurred to me when I thought of the gift-giving mechanic purely as another aspect of the game to complete so I could get married and have children, rather than as a fascinating part of the world of Stardew that should not be taken for granted or left unexamined. I can’t say that I’ve been fully convinced that the unexamined playthrough is not worth playing–or even that the playthrough that defers to an outside source for guidance can be fairly deemed “unexamined”–but my Stardew experiment perhaps gives extra credence to the stance of the anti-proceduralists in its display of the power of a player’s psychological framing in creating meaning over and above a game’s intrinsic properties.
