Feast of the Winter Star, a popular festival scene in Stardew Valley corresponding to Christmas in real life
The friendship system with the Pelican Town residents is an essential element of the Stardew Valley utopia where friendly folks of a tranquil rural town engage in dynamic social interactions with the players. The gift-giving system, in turn, is the most important mechanism of this friendship system, for it is the fastest and most convenient way of amassing friendship with the NPCs (way more efficient than merely talking to the characters and way more convenient than waiting to cook a good soup in Luau every summer). Indeed, one of the major reasons why players find the game attractive is that while they experience stress in socializing in reality, where they have to juggle with energy-consuming social norms and possibly unpleasant feedbacks, the easy-to-attend friendship system in Stardew offers positive feedback constantly, creating an optimal mode of light-hearted social contact. Once the player figures out the characters’ favorites, even a cheap present may win their hearts (literally)… The game seems to create an image where vexing social orders like consumerism do not exist anymore. However, is it really absent?
The answer may well be “yes” at first sight. The characters’ gift preferences reflect their innocent and down-to-earth desires, demonstrating little obsession with the general use values and/or exchange values (prices) of gifts. While
Sam, a NPC, working in Joja Mart
flowers, which are weak energy and health boosters, are universal liked gifts, sugar, the very often used ingredient in household cooking, is a universal hate. The gift’s exchange value does not matter, either. For example, to Sam, even a diamond is a worse gift than Joja cola (Which is categorized as “trash”!) Such a gift preference system displays the characters’ genuine attitude toward their preferences, which goes against an individual’s strong materialistic desire to possess pricy and distinguishing products as suggested by consumerism principles that seek to characterize modern society.
However, the game hides a more obscure implication of consumerism: In Stardew Valley, interpersonal relationships may not be centered around money, but it is not entirely about the people, either. To ask an NPC out, the player has to
The player character giving an NPC a bouquet to ask him to be a date
purchase a bouquet; To propose to their date, the player needs another 2000g to buy the Mermaid’s Pendant on a rainy day. Indeed, this money isn’t a big deal compared to what we buy for our companions in real life, but what should come to our mind is that, instead of making a choice through dialogue or even clicking on a button, Stardew Valley forces us to make our romantic choice by giving our love interest a physical object – even when it’s not about the price, it is still about the gift. This mechanic blurs the principal elements of a sincere relationship of mutual choice, communication, and consent, and it replaces them with the one-way pursuit of offering a commodity. Such a way of interpersonal interaction manifests the implication of consumerism that puts material merchandise above human-to-human connections in the moral scale of society.
Moreover, the lack of pure social connection between the player and the characters is also indicated by the absence of the player’s traits and personality’s significance on friendship, which adds to the game’s implication of the consumerist value of socializing. On the one hand, in real-world interpersonal interactions, the other individuals’ personalities and traits affect our judgment combined with the actions of socializing. However, in Stardew Valley, the players themselves do not matter. Besides being a skin, the players’ appearance does not matter to their friendship with NPC at all. Whether you wear the hilarious Living Hat or a beautifully colored dress, the villagers still love you the same. Your personality does not impact your social circle, either. Whether you are a charming combat master in the cave or a boring farmer that barely leaves your land, adventure-loving Abigail does not even care for one second when you give her a pumpkin or an amethyst. The players’ friendship with Pelican Town residents does not depend on objective traits about the player but only their spontaneous socializing. Disregarding a person’s characteristics and placing significance merely on their outward expressions are factors leading to consumerism, reflecting a society where people define others by the gifts they give but not by their authentic selves as individual human beings.
A BTS fan’s collection of idol merchandise items
The consumerist implications in Stardew Valley’s gift-giving mechanism, deliberately or subconsciously, entrench such veneration of commodities and disregard towards the truer forms of interpersonal relationships into its player audience. Like a sugar-coated bullet, the game conveys consumerism ideas unnoticed by the relaxed player. However, the distortion of social interaction norms is not a scarce case in digital media: The Korean idol culture encourages their fan base’s economic expanse in various ways by awarding them in-group approval and recognition, implicating that the fans’ materialistic sacrifice reasonably deserves an enhancement in their relationship with the idol as well as their fellows; the Gal-games in Japan downplays the influence of the player-character’s appearance and personalities in romantic relationships, most evident in the player’s absence as an active actor in their conversations, CGs, and endings, which all implicate that the in-game characters will fall in love with the player-character no matter what. In analyzing video games and digital media in general, we could not ignore these subliminal influences that may shape the audience’s perception of not only the games but also the reality they live in.
A CG from the popular GalGame DokiDoki Literature Club, capturing the typical image of the player character in Japanese GalGames. The player character usually hides his facial features and displays as few distinguishing traits as possible in CGs.
