Silence.
The cherry-red bobbed lulled on the stagnant water, all fish out of sight. After ten more seconds of nothing, my eyes flickered away from the pleasant farm world, breaking past the boundary of the TV screen to the one adjacent to it, where another player character wandered through town, chatting with villagers.
“I’m still missing two people.”
I blinked. “Have you talked to the girl who lives south of the farm?”
“The lady who sells cows?”
“No, the one who lives next to her… Jodie? No–”
“–no, that’s not it–”
“–Yeah, she’s a redhead though… darn, I can’t remember…Leah?”
“Right, Leah!”
“Yeah, that’s her name.”
“Uh, I think I got her already.”
“Oh, okay, gotcha.”
Silence again.
It was an odd experience. With only me and one other person playing Stardew together, our lulls in conversation inflicted a series of jarring immersion breaks as we switched between the game and physical world.
Out of the corner of my eye– a yellow exclamation mark above my character. My eyes darted back to my screen, sinking into the suddenly-animated scene. I pressed and lifted the “y” button to keep the fish highlighted, letting the vertical yellow shaft rise and fall as necessary until I reeled in another… anchovy.
I kept fishing until the sun set on the horizon of our beach farm. My partner sent their player to bed after running out of energy tidying up the farm. I offered to go to sleep, but they–in real life–shook their head, saying, “No, don’t waste the day!”
With their character in bed, their game world froze on the image of their sleeping character with the fourth wall-breaking notification– “Waiting for other players (½).” With their game world on pause, they disconnected from it, looking down at their phone to check the time.
I felt an odd sense of being watched. Before, we both dipped in and out of the game world, immersing ourselves within our characters and breaking the connections with real-time button-presses, checks on each other’s screens, and momentary interactions with the physical world. While I still occupied that fluctuating state, they now permanently adopted the role of the observer– both to my game world and me, operating my avatar.
I kept fishing; the night dragged on. I made a minor contribution to cleaning the oceans with the number of Joja Cola cans (all promptly drunk by my character) and hunks of trash I pulled from the sea.
Eventually, the classmate I was playing with struck up a conversation about a different video game we both played recently. As our conversation drifted to the game, I maintained split focus between my in-game fishing and out-of-game discussion. Our real life conversation broke through the game in a meta way– our characters weren’t talking, yet we were, and about something completely different from Stardew Valley.
With that, we fluidly drifted out of play as our session ended. Yet our game conversation continued for a bit after, naturally flowing out of our gameplay session. While the conversation during play was scattered, switching back and forth between conversations inside and outside the game world, the game served as a medium for conversation as the entire time. We never role-played as our PCs, only discussing the game world from our perspectives as observers. We talked about mechanics, our habits of interacting with NPCs, how we needed to finish the introductory quest– everything was in the context of our roles as players regardless of if we were talking about the game itself or not.
Regardless, the game was both an experience for us and a facilitator of a non-virtual experience. This reflects the potential of the multiplayer Stardew Valley experience, and the experience of multiplayer gaming has a whole, to add another dimension to play that might not be as visible in single-player modes.
