The premise of Stardew Valley opens with a white class office worker growing disillusioned with the monotony of her office and fleeing her desk job to reconnect with nature on her grandfather’s farm. This plotline of rural, naturalistic escape– in pursuit of a utopia of a small-town farm, handed down lovingly from a long-lost grandfather– may have been designed to appeal to the middle-class office workers that were being put forth as a new market for gaming. However, Stardew’s romantic fantasy of small-town farming deserves careful attention, especially in the way that it represents the manual difficulty, technique, and skill that goes into real-world farming, and forgets the long-term, physical consequences that may arise from intense manual labor. Even though Stardew superficially invites the player to return to Marx’s state of “species-being,” in which varied, “natural” kinds of labor return in opposition to the bland repetitiveness of an office or factory job, it does so by misrepresenting the difficulties of farming, and arguing for a fantastical, fictional lifestyle. Ironically, and unintentionally, it reduces the “natural” complexity of farmwork to the bland, repetitive labor that Marx associated with the factories of his time.
In game play, the protagonist comes already equipped with the knowledge of how to perform difficult manual tasks. Even though the player must learn the game “controls,” a simple set of controls cover a wide variety of tasks. For example, while holding a tool or weapon, if the (PC) player presses “C,” then that tool or weapon will be used. The uses may be as diverse as swinging an ax to chop down a large tree, using a hoe to plow soil, battling monsters with a sword, or casting a fishing rod; however, for the player, they have been standardized into the same, repetitive motion. This “shortcut” to a catalog of tasks allows the player to forget about the actual technique, strategy, and skill that must go into chopping a tree. Though it is not apparent from pressing “C,” doing something even as “manual” as chopping a tree, in reality, requires a certain kind of experience and practical knowledge: where to cut, how much force to use, and how to plan for the tree to actually fall in a non-destructive way. Stardew ironically minimizes this labor and invites the player to become a sort of factory worker who repeats a simple motion over and over again, instead of the farmer that they portend to be.
Once the player learns a skill (it seems) their tools can become more sophisticated, but their skill remains constant. One can upgrade to a copper ax and cut down trees with fewer presses of “C.” Still, the improvement is not because of the player’s actions themselves, but because of an external object which has bestowed them with more efficiency. Stardew thus dismisses the key role of the wood chopper’s skill, which in real life, is also in flux. Instead, Stardew assumes that the act of cutting a tree is so simple that once you know how to cut one tree, you can cut them all with equal efficiency.
Stardew represents the toll of the labor on the worker through the green energy bar that depletes as the player performs more manual labor. Even though the player grows sluggish as her energy depletes, this green progress bar does not accurately represent the real tolls of intensive labor over time. Each day of work in Stardew can be recovered in one or two nights, give or take a monetary penalty. There is no long-term buildup of stress, arthritis, or physical affliction which are often the most painful aspects of manual labor.
Finally, it is worth noting that the creative, productive, manual jobs in Stardew Valley are gendered, and mainly run by male characters. Clint is the blacksmith; Willy is the fisher; the wizard is male (the carpenter is the exception). The farm itself, and its heritage of hard, productive farmwork, come from the main character’s grandfather. Woman villagers occasionally run shops; however instead of performing unique or skilled labor, they are often in need of help; the first few tasks ask the main character to retrieve Jodi’s lost ax and grow cauliflower for Robin.
