For a pixel farming simulator that lets players live a quaint and serene life in a peaceful Pelican Town, Stardew Valley is surprisingly complex in its narratives. The beginning part of the game is mostly consisted of basic farming sim tasks like farming, raising animals, catching fish, foraging, and mining. Yet, as the players meet and befriend different NPCs, they soon get to learn the surprisingly heavy backstories of the villagers of Pelican Town. There are several NPCs in Stardew Valley who carry complex ‘real-life’ problems on their back. But here, I would like to focus on Kent, a character who returns to Pelican Town after witnessing traumatic events from his tour of duty in the army and shows various symptoms of PTSD as the player interacts with him.
Before we delve deeper into the analysis of Kent, let’s first take a look at what PTSD and trauma studies are. Trauma studies is a fairly new field of critical theory, as it was as late as 1980 when the American Psychiatric Association (APA) officially acknowledged the disorder called “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” (PTSD). Then in the 1990s, a flood of scholarship from various fields such as psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and sociology arose to study the concept of trauma and its significance in our society. So, what are trauma and PTSD? Trauma, according to APA, is an extreme emotional response to a terrible event that is outside the range of the usual human experience. And PTSD is, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, “a psychologically distressing event” that is accompanied by “intense fear, terror, and helplessness” and causes “significant distress in most people” (DSM‐III: 236–8, 248). Cathy Caruth, one of the most prominent figures in trauma studies, defines PTSD as a phenomenon “in which the overwhelming events of the past repeatedly possess, in intrusive images and thoughts, the one who has lived through them” (Caruth, 151).
Following the Holocaust and Vietnam war, trauma has been such an integral part of modern history and society. Thus, it became crucial to analyze and study how trauma is represented and explore the impact of it in society along with its psychological, rhetorical, and cultural significance. And this study of trauma requires special attention because trauma – despite the word’s common (mis)usage in our daily lives – is a very tricky concept. Cathy Caruth explains that trauma, and the disorder that comes with it, are fundamentally incomprehensible and unknowable. Trauma, Caruth explains, “in its unexpectedness or horror, cannot be placed within the schemes or prior knowledge” (153). So, it really comes down to the question of how to represent something that is fundamentally unrepresentable. This question has been studied attentively throughout various media forms but not so much in the context of video games. Yet, the need to discuss and examine the representation of PTSD and trauma in video games is more urgent than ever as games are becoming a central medium that propels discussion in this modern world. As the portrayal of trauma in games will affect the way people understand it, responsible representation of trauma and PTSD in video games is ever more important. Therefore, here, through Kent, I hope to see how Stardew Valley is making the players interact with such a heavy and intricate concept of trauma in the hope to illuminate more on the question of what aesthetic and institutional structures best mediate/represent PTSD in the medium of video games.
Now, let’s go back to the discussion about Kent. (Sidenote: I learned about Kent’s PTSD from one of our class discussions. We were talking about the complexity of Stardew Valley’s narrative and many of my much more experienced group members thankfully shared their knowledge. I wasn’t able to meet Kent on my own playing of Stardew Valley as I am still in Year 1, so much of the information below rely on the Stardew Valley Wiki.) Kent makes his first appearance in Year 2. Yet, the player can get various hints about Kent before actually meeting him by talking to his family members. For example, Jodi, Kent’s wife, often says to the player that her husband is a soldier and that she has been praying for his safe return home. There is also one heart event where Kent’s two sons, Sam and Vincent, talk about Kent. Vincent, who’s only a little kid, asks if their dad will ever return, saying that he overheard ‘grown-ups’ talk about war and mass military troop casualties. Then Sam, as an older brother, reassures Vincent that Kent will be back. However, as Vincent leaves, Sam says to the player that even he is not sure Kent will ever be back home and gets sad for giving his brother fake hopes. The player also gets to see the letter Kent sent to Jodi. 
All of these strongly hint how destructive and traumatic – and thus, realistic – the ongoing war in Stardew Valley world is. After Kent arrives, many dialogues with him clearly show that he is suffering from PTSD. Kent often talks about how he has trouble sleeping and the open field “makes [him] nervous.” He also tells the player that he has “lost a lot of friends in battle.” Then there is one heart event – which is the most telling evidence of Kent’s PTSD – where Kent screams in pain as Jodi’s making popcorn for him: “You should’ve known that sound would remind me of the war!” This shows a truly debilitating aspect of PTSD: the most ordinary and mundane things like the noise of popping popcorn can trigger the most haunting memories to the person.
Now, how should we read this representation of trauma/PTSD? Is this representation responsible? By interacting with Kent, the player gets to witness how much Kent’s trauma is debilitating and his process of rehabilitation – if he does make any process at all – is frustratingly slow. But most importantly, the player cannot play an active role in helping him – all we can do is to see how devastating and long-reaching the effect of war trauma is not only to the person but also to his or her loved ones. As such, the narrative of Kent simply tells how debilitating PTSD is and doesn’t give any false hope of resilience. In other words, Stardew Valley does not use the common trope of “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” in its narrative of PTSD. This is in contrast to the common criticism toward the utilization of trauma in video games. Many critics criticize how trauma and PTSD are utilized in a reductive sense for the means of manufacturing characters’ identities and motifs. Mathew Bunbalough and Adam Henze from Indiana University, through their analysis of two game series, Max Payne and Metal Gear Solid, point out how the complexity of trauma is reduced in games to serve “as catalysts for gunplay” (22). To be specific, traumatic events and PTSD are often used only to harden the characters as if they are tempered like a blade. Especially in military shooter games that feature war as a backstory, protagonists’ PTSD is not debilitating but gives protagonists motivations, strength, and resilience. Trauma in such cases works like a catalyst for the character’s metamorphosis into a cold-blooded badass. Through this lens, we can say that Stardew Valley did not fall into this common trope of reductive trauma narrative in video games. The character of Kent is nowhere near simple: he is not a badass soldier but a vulnerable individual still suffering in insurmountable pain.
But then again, we have to consider that Stardew Valley is a different genre of the game than shooter games like Metal Gear Solid. Stardew Valley can be categorized as one of the ‘cozy’ games. Agata Waszkiewics defines cozy games as games that provide safe gameplay with no risk, environments of abundance, and a soft aesthetic. And Stardew Valley – in its safe game mechanics, the abundant environment of Pelican Town, and soft aesthetic of relaxing music along with cute pixel visuals – is indeed a ‘cozy game’ that is “designed to give the player a relaxing, non-threatening experience” (Waszkiewicz, 233). That is, Stardew Valley is expected to be a soothing game that allows its players to escape from complicated reality and explore naively through the fantastical town where you get to hang out with a wizard and cute forest spirits. PTSD/Trauma seems rather oddly heavy topics to be featured in it. One could say that such a cozy aesthetic of the game can soften the blow of something as haunting as trauma and help the players process it from afar. In such a way, Stardew Valley could be opening doors for “more reflexive and mindful approaches” (Waszkiewicz, 227) toward emotionally convoluted issues that the players may not want to face by themselves. Yet, we still need to ask: would such an attempt to sweeten the pill be a responsible way to represent trauma in video games?
Works cited
Bumbalough, Mathew, and Adam Henze. “Infinite Ammo: Exploring Issues of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Popular Video Games.” Emotions, Technology, and Digital Games A Volume in Emotions and Technology, Academic Press, 2015, pp. 15–34.
Caruth, Cathy. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.
Waszkiewicz, Agata, and Martyna Bakun. “Towards the Aesthetics of Cozy Video Games.” Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, vol. 12, no. 3, 2020, pp. 225–240., https://doi.org/10.1386/jgvw_00017_1.
