As someone who’s new to Stardew Valley, I’ll admit that I have had a good time playing, exploring, and being sucked into the quirky simulation of Pelican Town. I love my cat, my forest farm, and just encountering new digital objects, characters and storylines. I noticed, however, that I cannot play for too long without being frustrated by the game’s internal clock and by the notion that I am confined under capitalism even in the world of a video game. If I choose to play for 4 hours straight, my play experience starts to feel akin to Groundhog Day — every in-game day feels painfully like a variation of the previous. Sure, things are different and the seasons change, but what’s the point when the simulated life feels pressured by work and profit? When, for example, you feel like the only way left to progress is to save up to upgrade your tools or buy a barn, which requires how ever many more finite in-game days of farming and selling? My life in Pelican Town becomes traumatic in a way. I am no longer able to escape into a pleasant reality that I had expected of Pelican Town. I try to focus on endeavors that don’t center (in)directly on making money, but my play quickly feels burdened by my intentional disruption that I can’t really relax and have fun anymore.
Although this perspective might sound very negative, I ultimately enjoy my play in Stardew Valley and see a lot of potential in its narratives and mechanics. In “Queergaming”, Edmond Chang describes a “queer(er) play” in games, where “conventional gaming aesthetics, goals, and poetics” are refused in order to generate a heterogeneity of play that “engages in different grammars of play”. More concretely, this looks like an opposition of normative gaming ideologies like “competition, exploitation, colonization, speed, violence, rugged individualism, leveling up, and win states” and rather development of “game play and end states that invite exploration, cooperation, complexity, mediation, ambivalence, alternative spaces, [and] even failure” (19-20). This queering of play is achievable through the complexity and gaming potentials in Stardew Valley. For one, many of the goals and tasks presented to my player character are honestly suggestions and mostly function as optional structures in the gaming experience to guide play at first. You can explore the main map and interact with the digital objects, spaces and other characters in any order you please or not at all if you choose. You can form relationships with other characters and/or choose to play in isolation from the townspeople. There is so much gaming variety from harvesting, fishing, crafting, building, in the quests, and in combat that the experience of gameplay will vary between users based on their preferences. I myself have not reached this game state, but I have heard of Grandpa’s evaluation where Grandpa returns to the farm in the 3rd year and determines your “success” in Pelican Town on a point system related to the number of candles that appear on his shrine. This may be interpreted as conforming to normative gaming ideologies as imposing leveling up, competition, and win state. However, as the full extent of grading in this evaluation is not explained before the 3rd year, Grandpa’s evaluation is really not part of the player’s experience of play prior. Alternatively, when Grandpa’s evaluation occurs, there is a potential for the players to experience failure and more ambivalence in their play as they are allowed to re-summon Grandpa and increase their candle ranking through a variety of ways such as amount of earnings, achievements, and their friendships.
Some really cool tree animations
Play in Stardew Valley might be “queer” in relation to Chang’s prescriptions; however, why does this matter? I wonder: how does this impact the user’s reception of in-game capitalism? It is no secret that Stardew Valley mediates a neoliberalism through its representation of capitalism, which is always apparent from the display of the amount of gold currency a player has in the top right corner of the screen. All players are given 500 gold to start with, and one of the first mechanics the player learns upon arriving at the farm is shipping, where items can be sold via the shipping bin for gold. This presents the player from the start with the expectation to engage with the in-game economic system and implies their farm work to be a means of obtaining an accumulation of earnings that is used for further endeavors. Play in Stardew Valley, from this introduction, is susceptible to the perpetuation of in-game capitalism and, therefore, would conform to normative gaming ideologies, including competition, entrepreneurship/rugged individualism, and even colonization in some senses. I’ll even hypothesize that this puts pressure on the player to “play correctly”, causing players to feel frustrated when completing quests via learning through play and feeling a need to consult the Wiki for second order experience. However, this perspective of gaming ideologies in Stardew Valley is not completely true. Since players quickly learn that they theoretically don’t have to make any money to continue playing, the play experience even with its in-game economic system is more complicated. There is a possibility for queering of gameplay, for example through exploration, forming relations with the townspeople, and resistance to a massive accumulation of earnings for the sole purpose of economic competition. Perhaps, this means that a queerer play in Stardew Valley combines with a representation of capitalism in order to offer an alternative perspective and learning experience for players. This dynamic would be interesting to further explore as it brings up the question: what does it mean for a game be “queer(er)” and still generate a representation of capitalism within its system?
