I am not a gamer. Even in understanding that the term is broad and open to interpretation, I would not consider myself one. Thus, playing Stardew Valley for the first time, I intended to approach it through the lens of discovery and adventure. In establishing this, I told myself that I would not use the internet as a resource as I wanted to learn as much as I could on my own playing the game. As I started out, I very much enjoyed learning the landscape, exploring with the map feature (which took me some time to discover the shortcut for), and creating my own purpose within the Stardew world.
This strategy worked quite well for the first four hours of my Stardew Valley gaming experience. Soon, I became frustrated with my lack of understanding of basic maneuvers, instructions for growing my farm and basic interactions with the locals of Stardew Valley. As a result, to avoid the complexities that I knew the game had to offer, I spent the majority of my time doing simple tasks such as clearing shrubbery and collecting wood. I grew pretty restless in my experiences but still wanted to hold to my agreement to learn the ropes myself. However, soon my final great frustration was with my inability to find and enter the mines. I knew from class that the mines were the place to discover much of the more fantastical features Stardew had to offer, and it was irritating to not be able to find the entrance.
This caused me to address the agreement I made with myself in the first place; why did I reject using the internet as a resource and how was it impacting my experience? I initially saw using the internet as cheating and felt as if I wasn’t giving the game the interactive experimentation it deserved by knowing everything from the beginning. I wanted to spend time doing what I thought was fulfilling within the game, but that frequently drained me of funds and got me nowhere. Although I envisioned my interactions with the game to be more fulfilling without using the internet as a crutch, contrastingly I soon found that my willful ignorance as a first time player was actually hindering my experiences.
Via Michael Christopher (The Gamer)
Within these experiences I began to establish that Stardew Valley, being the exploratory game that it is, gives lots of room for paving your own path, however for newcomers, better yet, infrequent gamers, learning the ropes and the goals of the game are difficult. Therefore, given these presented confusions, I began to utilize community forums and resources to begin to understand my character’s role within the game, the general mission and uncover easter eggs. Further, contrary to my prior beliefs, utilizing these online resources enabled me to work towards the end goal while also building my own personalized experiences and interactions.
Conclusively, my unique experience with Stardew Valley has inevitably shown me the value of community resources off and on-screen. Online forums and how to’s facilitated my ability to not only learn and progress as a character within the world of Stardew Valley, but also to become more enthusiastic about the complexities the world has to offer.
