Stardew Valley presents itself from the outset as a game of potentials and possibilities. While these possibilities are purposefully broad and voluntary–you can farm, or fish, or mine, or fight monsters, or craft, or do none of these things with impunity–the first task that the game sets before you is to introduce yourself to everyone in the town. This task serves as a subtle introduction to one of the game’s less obvious central mechanics. While it is not made immediately obvious to the player that the ultimate goal of the social mechanic is to gain points, represented by hearts that can be found on one of the menu screens, and that those hearts will eventually unlock events or special privileges, hints are left to the player in both the display of how many hearts one can eventually gain and the messages that pop up whenever one tries to enter an “off-limits” space such as a character’s bedroom.
If one follows the game’s early advice and seeks out every denizen of the Valley, itself an involving task for new players unfamiliar with the spatial and temporal structure of the game and the routines of its characters, they may start to identify characters who interest them more than others. In fact, the personalities and activities of the characters sometimes feel almost like a sort of pandering in their commitment to archetypes: Sebastian is a standoffish goth, Leah is an earthy artist, Alex is a friendly jock, Elliot is a reclusive writer who lives alone by the sea, and so on. There is an implication that there’s “a character for every player,” and a player who is particularly genre-savvy might take notice of just how many of the residents of their new neighborhood are young, attractively-designed, and single. Any thoughts of potential romance opportunities would be confirmed by a menu screen that displays a number of empty hearts next to each character.
What the social menu also makes clear to the player is that this mechanic in the game is driven almost entirely by gift-giving. Updates to the game have made it so that the player can see within this menu which of the gifts they have already given a character have been liked, disliked, loved, or hated. While talking to the characters is important too, these interactions are often shallow and repetitive, at least in the early stages–for example, even after giving Harvey numerous gifts and going in to visit him at the clinic every day for weeks, most of his dialogue consists of rather impersonal health advice. Some of the relationship candidates, particularly Shane, seem to actively discourage the player from continually speaking to them by responding with rude or antisocial comments. While this dialogue changes as the player builds up more heart points, this process takes time, and can begin to seem like a Sisyphean task as the characters respond with the same reactions to the same gifts day in and day out.
Even more potentially alienating than the repetition of dialogue, however, is the inherently transactional nature of relationships in Stardew. There is no consistent or easy way to build up heart points without giving gifts and giving them regularly. In exchange for gifts, the player receives a nebulous amount of points, difficult to assess until they have collected enough to earn another full heart on the menu screen. Gift-giving in order to achieve as many points as possible is fundamentally a process of trial-and-error (without consulting outside resources such as the Stardew Valley Wiki, that is). To return to the example of Harvey, if you give him the common Spring foraging item Salmonberry, he tells you that he thinks he’s allergic to it, thereby making the player lose relationship points. This places the player in an awkward position–there are no clues to suggest Harvey’s Salmonberry allergy other than his response when you thrust one upon him. He even still takes the gift, refusing the player the ability to try giving it to someone else who would appreciate it. This approximation of human relationships operates off of extremely simple principles, and yet follows a sort of hidden inner logic that can only be puzzled out through making mistakes and potentially losing points with a character despite following its most important rule of gift-giving.
What is particularly jarring about this almost exclusively transactional and impersonal social mechanic is that it is rarely ever reciprocated. Some characters may give you small gifts after unlocking a certain number of hearts, and the marriage mechanic has the spouse of the player sometimes give them meals or do chores around the farm for them, but this seems like a disproportionately small favor after the bounty of gifts that must be given to a character first before getting to the point of marriage. While the player is expected to keep track of their romantic interest’s schedule and plan when to visit them accordingly, they never receive a visit to their farm from said interest. Stardew presents a transactional theory of affection, but one that only works in one direction, from the player to a character who is either incapable or uninterested in being on the other side of the equation.
This one-way transactional approach ties in with a greater sense of self-made entrepreneurship that permeates Stardew as a text and sets the player up as a largely independent agent in a capitalistic world that is implied to exist, but never properly seen, outside the realm of the farm. The player makes money by throwing crops, fish, gemstones, and other materials into a box and receiving a tally at the end of the day. This is a money-making system that requires no haggling, no cooperation, no interaction of any kind with potential buyers, and does not allow the player to peer into what, exactly, their products are being used for or where they’re going. Making money is the goal, not farming for the sake of producing food supply or building up a business arrangement that includes anyone other than the economically solipsistic player. Likewise, the player is paradoxically set up as a socially solipsistic figure, who must figure out how to properly befriend or woo everyone else in the Valley like a puzzle, relying solely on the same sorts of products that are used to make money, only ever expected to use emotional intelligence or interpersonal skills during discrete “events” that ask the player to make rare dialogue selections. In this way, Stardew’s transaction-based model of friendship and affection is another manifestation of its central attitude towards economics as a system that revolves almost entirely around the player and their independently-made decisions, not cooperation or competition or any truly social element that lies between.
