I had never heard of Stardew Valley before I started this class. I don’t really occupy a space in the world that video games often permeate; there was the Sims in middle school, sure, some idle games through high school (Atomas, notably — don’t know why I was surprised to end up a hard sciences student), but that was it. Part of why I think I avoid video games is the same reason I avoid other types of media: they stress me out. As soon as something goes wrong, a health bar starts ticking down, a timer runs out, a NPC is annoyed by something my character says — I get stressed the same way I would about these things in real life, and then the activity loses its fun. So you can imagine that, once you exclude any games with negative consequences, there’s not a lot of options left in the video game world. It just became easier to avoid them altogether than try to find things that would work.
All this to say that, before I pre-registered for this class, I had to Google Stardew Valley. And there it was – blue skies, green fields, a little farm. Nonstressful. Which is why it came as a shock to me that within the first few hours of playing there was an energy bar that dwindled quickly, some kind of rat infestation happening at the community center, and a sword handed to me in a dark, creepy cave by an old man wearing a cape. Not farming – stressful. There was farming, too, but the crops were under threat from weeds and crows. Giving people the wrong gifts made them angry. Something was making roaring sounds in the sewer. And then in class someone mentioned that after two years the grandfather shows up and evaluates how you’ve been doing, and that’s stressful, because I go to UChicago, so as soon as you tell me something is graded I panic about doing badly, which only reminded me that technically, I was only playing for a grade, and very quickly it didn’t really feel like an idle, calming farming game anymore.
That’s when I began to notice how much Stardew Valley is a game of subverting expectations. You think it’s a comfort game, and then it’s not. You think it’s about farming, and then it’s not really. You think it’s a casual game, and then it’s not (I guess it can be up for debate, given a class discussion a few weeks ago, but at the point that I need to boot up Steam on my laptop to play a game, I don’t consider it casual anymore). You think it’s an open world, but then large areas are restricted to you. And then, to get to the next important idea, you think it’s a collaborative game, and then it’s not.
One of the many different ways to play the game is to focus on the social aspect, building relationships with the villagers. You can anger them, make friends with them, romance them, give them gifts, and explore their houses. It’s hard to avoid, even if it’s not something you’re actively looking for — I was more focused on building up my farm and earning money (can you tell I used to be an econ major?), and even so I couldn’t avoid running into people, and let’s not forget needing to introduce myself to everyone in the village to clear the first task. So with the emphasis on a social game, and the fact that the multiplayer option is available from the opening screen, I assumed that this would be a collaborative game. And once again, it wasn’t.
My roommate’s in this class, so we started playing together during second or third week. It wasn’t easy – I don’t know if this is a universal problem, or just our laptops, but it takes about a half hour just trying to get them to connect. And I was surprised again by how unintuitive the game was in terms of collaboration. Your avatars can’t interact – not positively or negatively. You don’t have to share money, but even if you do, there’s nothing that forces you to communicate with each other regarding how it’s being spent. You can have separate homes or adjacent ones, but even if they are right next to each other, there’s nothing that really distinguishes one person’s from the next, so much so that one person can use another person’s house like their own. You conduct all your quests separately; when it came to the lost ax, for example, he found it and returned it to Robin, and then I went to the same place and also found it and returned it to Robin. It was an odd lack of continuity that made it almost feel like we were not operating in the same universe. You can set shared objectives, but all that really means is that you can both dedicate yourself to collecting a certain resource or conducting a certain activity, and there’s not much to do by the way of actually helping each other — you’re still working separately. This was really driven home by the class communal game on Tuesday, since I was in that session where the separate pods sharing controllers really didn’t really communicate with each other at all, despite all sharing the same space, with people throwing out questions that would just go unanswered and things being sold or gathered, much to the surprise of the others. All in all, I wasn’t surprised when most of the metagames we proposed in class were competitive, not collaborative- it’s hard to figure out how you could collaborate much in either a basic or creative way in this game. It’s just not built to accommodate that.
These aren’t complaints – they’re observations that at every turn, Stardew Valley has subverted what I expected of it and become a different game, one where there’s a lot more happening than growing and gathering parsnips. I don’t know how much of this was purposeful on the developer’s part and how much of this was purely accidental, unintentional consequences of their own blind spots in the creative process. I don’t know how much of this is a good thing or a bad thing. What I do know, at this point, is that Stardew Valley is not a farming game.
