I do not have much experience with online multiplayer games. Short of the brief period in the pandemic when Among Us became all the rage, I have no experience playing games with anyone outside my immediate family or friend group. For one, I do not gravitate towards PvP or battle royal type games and more often than not, online multiplayer games are such. A few that come to mind are Fortnite or Apex Legends. I never really understood the inclination to come in contact with random strangers only to immediately pit yourself against them, especially with voice chat. The chaos of having words and potentially insults slung at you throughout the experience honestly seems like hell. Even the little chat box in Among Us that allows the players to deliberate their decision gives me anxiety. In every game, there is a need to prove to everybody that I was a capable player, despite the fact that these people would never know who I am or even give it a second thought. For some reason, in the 15 minutes it took to complete a game, I found myself caring the whole time what these people not only thought about me as a player, but as a person. I picked up specific language to fit in to not seem like a complete beginner. I was hyper aware of the tone of my messages, not only to win the game, but to make sure that these other anonymous people knew I was cool.
Needless to say, the idea of playing Stardew with other people was a bit daunting. When I arrived, there were only four of us. As we started, there was a surprising lack of conversation. We each kept our eyes on our screens and attended to our own tasks. Even so, I felt a pressure to not seem incompetent. As more people filed in, this pressure started to dissipate. There were two factors that I pinpointed which aided in this dissipation. For one, amongst the small group of people who joined me, I had had the most time to learn how to operate the switch controller and how the keystrokes translated. It was comforting to feel like I knew something well enough to help somebody else. We were in it together. Secondly, the open-ended nature of Stardew meant it was nearly impossible to compare any one’s progress to any other character. The individual groups that formed at each console were isolated in their objectives and the money was pooled so there was no metric to establish who was doing “better.”
What complicated the peacefulness of this game experience was a mechanic of Stardew itself. In Co-op mode, players have little in the way of physical interaction. However, all players have access to all the chests and there are few parts of the game that require all the player to be on board. For example, going to bed or to the Egg Festival. As a result, the only interaction between groups that occurred was when someone was frustratingly far from their bed or if someone’s hard earned copper was mysteriously missing from the chest. I’ll get over it. It dawned on me that by and large, the only intercommunication that took place was when something was infringing on their own advancement.
This is not to say that anyone was unpleasant or angry. In fact, it was funny. It became a communal experience to wait for that last group who was out mining a bit too late. To a certain extent, it showed that playing face to face with a person did not escalate emotions. Contrast this with the rage culture of gaming and the tendency for random strangers on the internet to cuss each other out when something goes wrong. Had I or even my group been completely isolated from the other groups, I don’t think a bit of stolen copper would have been a passing annoyance (at least for me). Communal gaming necessitates the reminder that every player is a person and even if you can’t see them, they are probably pretty cool.
