I used to be a huge lover of farming games: games like Mole Farming, Sier Spaceship used to keep me playing until 2-3 a.m. for a whole month. Yet strangely, I never quite get immersed into the world of Stardew Valley. I play it in order to know the game mechanics, most likely to prepare for class discussions and filling out details for blog posts, but never for once did Stardew Valley become my first choice when I am idling around and finding entertainment. How does this happen to me, a former farming game lover?
After some deliberation, I discovered that a few reasons might contribute to my indifference to Stardew Valley. The minor reason is that when playing Stardew Valley becomes a task for search and analysis, it adds a new lens for me which resists me from actually enjoying the game as a game, but more as a digital object waiting to be analyzed, interpreted, and theorized. But I think the most important reason is that after learning that behind these different farming games lies the same characteristics: appeal to self-entrepreneurship, escape from the real world, and so on. Suddenly, I lost my meaning in playing this game. The former experience of playing similar games reminds of the fact that in the end, you are going to become a landowner with a lot of money to burn in your virtual account. Just like someone who just realized that life will always end the same and becomes a nihilist, I lost my purpose in the virtual world and therefore lost my interest in playing such games. To others, the mimic of real time elapsing, the alternating season, and the limited energy bar makes the game more realistic and fun; yet to me, these features now become annoying obstacles stopping me from getting to the end faster.
When I realized that my interest in Stardew Valley is unsavable, I turned to another mode of playing: try to play it like a communist. As I mentioned in my first blog post, the Stardew Valley adopts the capitalist mode of production in the game, making this game capitalistic in its root. But still, I tried a lot of ways to make it less capitalistic and more communistic:
Most importantly, I tried to break the capitalist mode of production. As I have analyzed in my first blog post, the monetary system in Stardew Valley reflects the capitalist mode of production and implies the constant accumulation of money as the end. In order to turn it into a communist society, it is necessary to first break this unending loop of accumulation and let money become the means to an end instead of the other way around. Because of the constraints put on by the monetary system, I cannot donate my money or divert it to other uses before I could have a stable produce in my farm. Therefore, I play the game and accumulate the money as everyone does in the first place, but I then chose to donate most of my farm’s surplus when my farm reached a certain scale, only reserving the daily cost of my farm. In this way, I think I have broken the inherent loop of M-C-M in the game and turned the money to the means for greater good.
However, I concluded that it is very unlikely to build a communist utopia, or to be more specific, a playable one in Stardew Valley because of the lack of sense of community. Although you can work hard, give your surplus, and try to be a responsible citizen in communist society, you still lack a sense of belonging in Pelican town. While you work hard on your farm, striving for the good of the whole town, it is necessary to see that other townspeople are also striving toward the same goal as you do. Right now, it is just like you are fighting against the whole capitalist system, which is very unpleasant.
Finally, I begin to wonder what a communist game looks like in the future. While these games give you a sense of self-entrepreneurship, what the real communist game should be like? After all, since we don’t ever have a real communist society for now, it may be extremely hard to imagine that kind of Utopia. Also, as noted by Professor Jagoda in his article, maybe the game itself might be a side product of capitalism, so it cannot easily represent a different kind of ideology.
