I like the unintentional symmetry my three blog posts have created – a critical study of Stardew Valley and disability, a look at all the ways the game subverts expectations by carrying an element of stakes/stress, and now this one, where we get to choose an entire new method of gameplay that allows us to exclude the things that had bothered us. My roommate’s in this class too, and we’ve been playing collaboratively on and off throughout the quarter, so we decide to choose a mod together and continue playing on one of our joint farms. He’s the one that found the mod we’d end up using: CRB Cheats. The only way to describe it is that it allows you to circumvent nearly every rule of the game – essentially, to play god.
Warp to any place on the map. Add any amount of coins to your account. Auto-water plants. Increase run speed up to ten times. Adjust friendship levels with NPCs. Unlimited energy and health. The possibilities were nearly limitless; you game the game. And at first, I don’t think we understood what this meant. We started again on our sad little farm on a rainy day, with a few patches of planted land, one-heart relationships with a few people apiece, and a couple hundred coins in our wallets. About an hour later, we had cleared the entire rest of our farm, mined a pretty hefty supply of copper and ore, built a furnace, planted several dozen crops, and started full-heart relationships with at least half the town. And it was really fun. Maybe the two of us are bad gamers, but that level of control over the game felt a lot more freeing. There just wasn’t anything to worry about. I’m naturally a bit of a control freak and an over-planner, so I kept thinking ahead and suggesting things we needed to do, like save up money for a bigger backpack or go visit the wizard, and my roommate kept asking why? This must have happened four or five times before I realized that planning was useless because everything, absolutely everything, was possible.
This was, in many ways, the Stardew Valley I recognized – the pixellated trees, the familiar sounds, the small red and blue coveralls. But in every fundamental, crucial way, it was a different game entirely. Maybe this is because, as I mentioned in my previous blog, I tend to be an anxious person, and I get hyperaware of things like time constraints or health/energy bars, but that really defined my Stardew Valley play experience — I don’t think I was really embracing the possibilities of what the game could be because I was always keeping one eye on those metrics, trying to do everything perfectly “right.” So playing a game without the need to get things “right” or not mess up because I could immediately correct nearly any mistake I made was an entirely different gameplay experience, one where I was free of many of the anxieties that plagued me the first time around.
So really, at the end of the day, it was a different game. Playing this mod helped me understand how much a game is defined by the rules that govern its internal world. There’s a saying in Judaism that the world stands on three pillars — three fundamental values that must remain true, essentially, in order to hold up the integrity of our society. If you crumble these pillars, it is no longer the same religion or the same community – it has mutated into something else. The same goes, I think, for a video game. Without the health bar, without the need to slowly court the villagers, without the need to explore and travel across the map to get places, this is no longer Stardew Valley. It’s a new game with new rules, and it just happens to be those rules are practically no rules. (Reminds me of the Mysterious Benedict Society – “the only rule is that there are no rules.”)
And yet— and yet there were limits to the edges of our power. We couldn’t artificially collect resources: we still needed to farm or scavenge or purchase them if we wanted to get the bundles at the community center or something. Things still closed at certain times and couldn’t be accessed when they were (now a mod that would let us break in – that would be cool). People still conformed to their schedules and had to be hunted down if you wanted to talk to them or give them gifts/fulfill quests. At first these things annoyed us. But my the time we had played for an hour or so, I was grateful for having these things there because otherwise we old have been playing a pointless game where nothing, at the end of the day, mattered— frankly, even with these things I was trying to figure out why I should still plant parsnips in order to get a couple dozen coins a pop when I had hundreds of thousands of them in the bank. These things still gave us something to work towards, a “point” to this new version of the game. So this mod, overall, made me understand the value of rules in a video game, constraints – they can be irritating, but they drive a game forward and definite its parameters. On the flip side, though, too many rules, or unexpected constraints, can move the realm of gameplay into something that can be anxiety-producing and no longer as enjoyable – I stand by my original analysis that Stardew Valley, with its scary shaking sewers and passing-out-in-the-streets penalties and slime monsters, is not a comfort game, and playing a mod where I really didn’t have to worry about those things only deepened my conviction about this by creating contrast. I’m not saying that one is better than the other because there really is no “better” in these experiences, just personal taste. But I’d rather take the free money and space-warping any day.
