[Originally posted to dreamwidth.org in early 2017. Since then, my social circle has, in fact, broadened somewhat.]
Heavily influenced by this article, I talk about why a farming simulator became the perfect antidote - and at the same time, the perfect enabler - to loneliness.
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Stardew Valley is both exactly my type of game, and not my kind of game at all. I usually play RPGs; I want to immerse myself in a rich story, I want to experience storytelling like television or movies. I want voice acting that'll make me cry. Simulators are fun, but they don't always have the story to keep me motivated. "Why am I still doing X game mechanic", when there's no narrative payoff. I want to see more story.
But Stardew Valley is a perfect example of how sometimes things just, come together and work. It's not just a farming simulator. It's not really an RPG. Everything about it is charming. The town is engaging, well written. The game mechanics can be hard, but not completely unforgiving. You're rewarded for figuring things out. You can sink into it and tell yourself, "just let me water one more crop. I'm just building slowly."
There are enough moments to discover, enough interactions, that you want to see more. And then more again. You want to see your little game character thrive, and the town around them.
Somehow, Stardew Valley is a pixelated version of video games' answer to "how to slowly build a life."
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Five and a half years ago, I moved from a large Canadian city to a small town in the arctic. When I first started planning the move, most of my friends were astonished, and gave it a year; I was moving from a city I loved -- for its anonymity, for its size, for its breadth and depth of different things to do and see and be -- to a town without a Starbucks. The town I live in doesn't have an Indian food restaurant. There are nineteen thousand of us here, crammed in amid the rocks and trees and lakes, and two thousand kilometres between us and anywhere else.
To my confused, skeptical friends and family, I said, "It's a great career opportunity. A lot of things have changed here, it feels time to make a change myself. I want to experience something different for a few years, make some money. I can move without changing jobs, which isn't gonna be easy this year." It was 2011 and the job market was shrinking. Everyone was surprised, but understood how it would be a great career opportunity. To help sell the lie, it was a good career opportunity; I make more here than I could anywhere else, there's room for advancement. From the outside, it makes sense.
It had nothing to do with escape.
Not that long after I'd shipped all my worldly posessions away and was living out of a suitcase, I met up with friends for drinks. One night, I got into a conversation with my friend, M. As we caught each other up on news, she somehow saw the truth of why I'd gone, even before I did. Less than a year after I'd moved, my friend M told me, "I thought you moved up north to be able to play even more video games and avoid people. Didn't you?"
I'd been talking about how hard it was to meet people here. Taken aback, I asked her why.
"Because," she told me, "that's all you were doing before you left."
My close friends had moved away a few months before I started planning the move myself, including my ex-girlfriend. Because of it, everything about our social group had shifted, fallen apart. I wasn't enough glue, and people were drifting. That happens, don't get me wrong. But M was right: I'd been trying to find a way to crawl into the computer to find people to talk to. Fictional people.
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Stardew Valley. The game starts by introducing the main character, a cubicle drone who is dissatisfied with their place in life and the never-ending drudgery, the routine, of urban office work. The game setup is that your grandfather has left you his old farm, and so you move from the big city to make a living off the land. You pick your character's gender, your look, your name. The name of your grandfather's farm. Whether you like cats or dogs. The farm is ramshackle and overgrown, and you are starting over from scratch in a place as different from the concrete jungle as possible, where the only way to make any money is off the land.
The mechanics, other reviews tell me, are very similar to Harvest Moon, if the most frustrating parts are no longer frustrating. You have a certain amount of energy and time per day, and you choose what activities you want to do: plant seeds, water seeds, chop wood. Fish. Mine for ore. You have very limited in-game money, and in order to get more you have to grow and sell crops. Each season is twenty-eight days, a nice, round number, and on the first day of each season, your crops wither and you plant new varieties. Strawberries grow in the spring. Blueberries grow in the summer.
No guesswork. No wondering what is eating your berry bush even though you've sprayed for bugs. No leave scorching when it's too hot. If you water your plants, they grow. Like magic.
Because of the finite resources of time, energy, and money, the first year of Stardew Valley you mostly farm and forage and collect as much stuff as you can to sell, so you can buy seeds to make more money. The early game is all about planting as much as you can as quickly as you can, because otherwise you can't afford anything. There's a mountain cave to explore, but no time to look -- so check it out in the winter. There are lots of places to fish, but no energy left once you've watered crops.
This sounds existential, writing it out. It's very soothing. Even if you want to explore everything, the game forces you to wait. "Patience," it says. I know it sounds like, "drudgery," but trust me. Sometimes, all you want in an open world video game, is being told to wait, don't worry, things will be there later.
If you're lucky, while you're tooling around chopping wood and buying more seeds, you'll talk to the villagers as they go about their days. There are about thirty villagers, all with their own stories, some of whom you can marry (eventually). Some of whom hold secrets. They run the store, they own businesses. Even in an 8-bit pixelated farming simulator, the NPCs have fully fleshed out lives and wants and habits, which you can see acted out if you pay attention. They don't care if you want to sell some fish; Willy is going to go to the forest today. It doesn't matter if today is the day you have enough money to buy a cow; if it's Tuesday, Marnie is busy. This doesn't change, even as the game progresses.
Even as you get to know them, the villagers keep on doing their thing.
Some people, like Jodi and Sam and Leah, like Mayor Lewis and Marnie the rancher, are friendly. Some, like Shane and Clint the blacksmith, like Sebastian, aren't. Some, like the schoolteacher Penny, seem unsure what to say if you approach them.
The saying goes, "in a small town everyone knows everyone's business," but in Stardew Valley, people don't necessarily invite you in. You're an outsider in town, and no one -- even the friendly townsfolk -- seems to know what to do with you. Hey, new farmer, the townspeople say. What's happening? How's it going? Farming must be easy, huh? It sure must be relaxing.
I'm busy, they say. What do you want?
You plant seeds and chop wood and go to sleep. You water crops and chop wood and go to sleep. You stop by the saloon and present gifts to the townspeople if you can afford it: a hot pepper for the Mayor. A beer for Shane. A beer for Pam, who is in the saloon every day.
You wake up and water crops. No one comments on Pam in the saloon. The townspeople don't talk about what's going on.
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I have a confession to make: I did move here to crawl inside video games, because people are hard, and I am very bad at them.
Being outgoing and lively is not the problem. I'm an extrovert. Being kind, that's the difficulty. People in real life don't forgive you for being a jerk if you bring them a present; even if they did, I wouldn't know how to make that gesture in real life. Asking for forgiveness is barely in my vocabulary; being Canadian, "I'm sorry" is a rote sentence, nothing of substance. I work in an office of ten, and haven't spoken to one of my coworkers in three years.
This is a small town, and if you have a big mouth and a tendency to use it, it seemed safer to avoid people. I run into people I work with in the grocery store. Outside the pharmacy. In the street. Everywhere. And all of those people also know people I know. In real life, I avoid the saloon: drinking is a way to let loose, to forget, to damn the consequences. Everyone sees it here if you get sloppy, and you can't just avoid seeing the people who saw you make an ass of yourself.
I can't buy a beer for Shane and then ignore him the next day. The safer option is not to go to the saloon.
It has taken me thirty five years to learn how to avoid people, but it came at a steep cost: I have nothing to water, nothing to grow.
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In your second year of Stardew Valley, if you're lucky and have planned carefully, you've got some sprinklers for your crops and your farm has started to manage itself. You've upped your energy so you can plant everything in one go, on day one, and with sprinklers, the crops maintain themselves. You don't have to spend every waking minute trying to scrape together money for seeds. If you bought animals, they've got auto-feeders. Your chickens and ducks and rabbits only need you to pet them, and you can let them outside and fend for themselves. Your cows are milked, your sheep are shorn. Instead of your entire in-game day being taken up with farming, it's your morning. Then part of your morning.
Your farm is thriving. Things start to run more smoothly. You have free time.
In your second year, you can start to visit people once a day, getting to know them. The more you talk to the townspeople, the more you learn about them. You pet animals so they give you a heart and like you -- this is the game mechanic that improves your animal products to sell. If your chickens heart you, they'll lay large eggs. The animations are adorable. You pet them and they cluck at you. You still water crops to cheerful theme music. But the more you get to know people, the more depth develops.
The less unrepentantly cheerful the game seems.
The townspeople who start out friendly and cheerful turn out to have other layers. Jodi, the outgoing mother of two, is concerned she got married too young and now is missing out on life. Sam, the happy skater dude, is shown to be indecisive, lazy. Shane, the town grouch who rebuffs your advances at friendship, has major depression. Doctor Harvey, the empathetic physician who is concerned with the townspeople's nutrition, had to give up on his life-long dream because of health issues.
Pam is drinking.
The townspeople are still nice, still move about their days in the same patterns. You can still give people presents and they warm up to you. You still see them in the square, in the saloon, day in and day out. But the more you talk to them, the more they reveal. Mayor Lewis is hiding a relationship with Marnie because he's the kind of jerk who thinks people will judge him for it. Neither are happy about the situation. When you find them, there's no way to say, "you should treat her better"; only "I'll keep your secret" or "I'll tell everyone."
I think that is intentional on the part of the writer: you can't fix these problems. They aren't yours to fix.
You water crops. You pet chickens. You make cheese and cloth and pickles and jelly and live an idyllic country life right out of every urban dreamer's visions of the magazine Harrowsmith.
Pam is still drinking.
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Here's an open secret about the north: substance abuse issues, alcohol being largest among them, are prevalent.
I tell everyone, "I'm the only person who moved up north and stopped drinking."
I don't tell them why.
So this town has a pretty big drinking problem. Alcohol links to intergenerational trauma among Indigenous people, and a lot of the non-Indigenous northerners find themselves with too much time on their hands and nowhere to go but the bar, too. Caution: that is a very, very simplistic explanation of a very complex, sticky problem.
The reason I don't drink that often isn't because I'm concerned about my own addictions. It's because people will see -- I can't avoid people seeing. I don't like to drink at home, but I like the bar to be an oasis of consequence-free action. I don't want to drink with my boss and have their friends at the next table see (happened), or get drunk enough with a friend from down south we make out and have my neighbours see (also happened). The itch of having to face my decision-making while drunk -- always fun! rarely sound -- is what keeps me from the bars here.
If I need to go nuclear on a social circle, I don't want the ripples coming back to haunt me where I cannot avoid them. In my large city, that was a move two kilometres down the road. That distance, a thirty minute walk, could be the world. Here, everyone is connected, and you cannot escape them.
I haven't gone out with anyone here, either, choosing to stay single rather than face a breakup that could ruin things.
Between loneliness and consequence, I've picked the computer screen. M was right.
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Steam tells me I've sunk 407 hours into Stardew Valley to date1. I have five save files, three of which are 'finished'. This last playthrough, I knew what I was aiming for and what I needed to achieve it. I didn't sell the eels. I bought all the rare fish if I saw them for sale, regardless of how pricey they were. I wanted to restore the town's community centre, I wanted to push out the mega corp and bring back a sense of community.
I wanted to belong.
As part of this preparation in my year two, I knew I needed to get married. You can put it off, you can never get married if you want. But it was one of my goals: start a family, have my crops auto-watering themselves. Have my farm buildings fully upgraded. Succeed.
Once you get married, however, the dynamic of what you can do in-game changes. Your spouse doesn't like it if you're away from the farm all day, every day, so you have to show back up around dinner time. This eats into the time you would usually spend chatting with townsfolk, catching up on the news. Making friends.
I spend most of winter, year two, saying nothing to anyone in town. My husband needs me at home, my crops need me, the animals need me. There's too much to do, and these people all heart me -- which means I've seen all their dialogue before. Nothing new happens. I don't have to talk to them to know that. I've exhausted what they have to say.
This is a terrible and accurate portrayal of anyone in a small town you are friends with because of proximity. Few people are friends because you've chosen them to be. They're just there; inescapable.
Winter also highlights the routine that, at first, is Stardew Valley's greatest strength, but slowly becomes its weakness, too. Every day I do the same things, making more gold, only now I have no goal. I upgraded my barn. I own a horse. I have reached the bottom of the mine. My greenhouse is fixed and producing berries all year. I have the idyllic life I was striving for.
The game mechanics remind you: day in and day out, life is routine. I don't mean to say this is a negative; only that it is, and is true, and I like and dread it in equal measure. I don't think Stardew Valley means to say it's a negative either; only that it is, and is true. On rainy days, my husband Shane - he of the major depression - says "I just can't get out of bed today." His pixelated character sits there, face turned away from yours, staring at the wall from dawn until dusk. He says, "There is no point in getting up today."
Shane, sweetheart. I understand.
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1 As of July, 2019, that number is now almost seven hundred hours.