The difficulty of finding NPCs in stardew valley has been a big barrier to my motivation to complete quests. While I understand that the designer expects players to explore the routine of NPCs by approaching them and observing them which adds freshness and the feeling of surprise to the game, the time cost is extremely high. The act of following NPCs into their houses and memorizing their routes are often seen as unproductive since the player could use those time to produce direct economic values: farming, fishing, mining, or even playing with trash can yield something. Thus, when I saw the NPC map mod on Nexus Mods, I did not hesitate at all to add it to my game. Who wouldn’t like to make some quick and easy cash while making more friends at the same time?
The mod, as I now analytically and retrospectively look at my gameplay experience, had two major effects on my imaginary social relationship with the NPCs. Firstly, it largely reduced my satisfaction when receiving hearts and thus devalued my construction of friendship with the NPCs. Originally without the mod, I had to either wait at a location for a whole day waiting for a certain villager to appear (or not, I guess sometimes they just don’t feel like seeing me) or to look up stardew wiki to find out the exact location of one at the exact right time. Both of these actions cost a lot of effort and time, but the pleasure of finally finding the NPC and delivering the right item to them was definitely rewarding. It is rewarding because of the time and energy I spent looking for the NPC. It is also through this experience that I was able to implicitly know more about each character, about where they would like to hover around and who they like to stay together with. If we abandon our purely economic lens, looking for NPCs is productive in the sense that the player is able to discover the hidden narrative in the game as well as to establish a virtual social bonding. Yet as soon as I start using the mod, the pleasure, as well as the value of friendship, has gone. I was able to so quickly complete the quests that I could easily make friends with almost anyone in the village with the hearts gained. I was making friends, but I was also losing friends because I did not procedurally go through the process of observation and thus, I know nothing about my new friends. Then, are they still friends at all? I guess no.
Secondly, the mod further symbolizes the NPCs into simple gift takers and quest rewards and dehumanizes them in a way that their personality, mood, and emotive features were left unexplored and thus, deprived of. When I was thinking about which NPC to visit and where to go, the location is always associated with some specific features of the character. For example, I could find Eliott standing by the sea at night sometimes which indicated his interest in fishing and boating. Yet the map helped me skip the process of logically connecting the location to the character, and I just went wherever the NPCs were on the map graphically. It prevented me from immersing myself in the situational and emotional context of the NPCs, which make the NPCs no longer affective agents but mere graphical symbols with rewards.
