I figured this week talking about Stardew Valley finally was appropriate, since I think it’s useful to use the game to think more about the relation between mechanics and narrative, and the affect of work.
Stardew Valley is a game about maintaining a farm. But it’s also about fostering relationships between your avatar and the villagers, mining for materials and wealth, and leveling up five skills. There are mini goals in the game, but there is no time limit for them. Many people find the game relaxing and methodical, and that’s how the game was advertised to me by friends.
The game, however, is also about narrative. You have dialogue scenes with villagers that get more intimate as you get to know them more (i.e. one villager named Alex reveals his father was abusive and his mother died when he was a kid). As you are transplanted into this rural location, so is a company called JojaMart, the representation of a capitalist greed. One of the major choices you make is to restore the Community Center or to invest in JojaMart, and the game through its characters hints that the latter is a bad decision.
JojaMart is interesting because it is portrayed as monotonous with the lack of color variations and the cool tones used, as well as the lack of music playing when you enter the store. Overall, it’s a sanitized, soul-sucking place, where one of the employees hates their job so much they want to commit suicide. If you purchase a membership of the store, the Community Center is destroyed and replaced with a Joja Warehouse, where you then can purchase upgrades to the town, instead of providing produce, minerals, or food to the inexplicably magical Junimos that live at the Community Center. Instead of producing or foraging for these bundle items, you just pay money.
“What casual games make clear, however, are both that game mechanics are intimately tied to the representational practices of games and that game mechanics are themselves kinds of fictions”
I would argue Anable's claim about casual games applies to Stardew Valley, mainly because the game is casual in mechanics, but not necessarily in terms of the time you have to put into the game. In this sense, I'm liberally applying Anable's analysis.
Alongside the general criticism of corporate capitalism, the game mechanics fictionalize farming life by simplifying the tasks. Like many other farming games (looking at you Farmville), planting, watering, and harvesting a crop takes a single button. As a media, the game can only represent these actions, and simplifying them I would argue is inevitable. This simplification of the action is paired with the sheer quantity of actions you have to complete in order to maintain a farm that produces profit. The narrative of the game, the villagers’ words, the empty atmosphere of Joja Mart, encourages the player to side with community and against a profit obsessed system. And the mechanics tell a story of magically simple labor requiring repetitive diligence that turns into profit. These dual narratives seem to complement but also conflict with each other.
When I think of affect, I think of the space between an event and a feeling, the atmosphere. For Stardew Valley, the affect of work seems to be a complicated relation between the pride you get from diligently and repetitively laboring to create profit and the greed you can get from fixating on profit over people. It’s hard to put into words, but I think that a lot of players got this sense while playing the game. People who said they chose to side with Joja Mart cited productive reasons; it allowed them to “finish” the game quicker or easier. For those on the other side, Joja Mart seemed against the narrative and like the “dark side,” while the Community Center was a fulfilling route. The dialogue elements and game mechanics merge these two conflicting narratives.
I looked at forums on why people chose the Community Center or Joja Mart (are these sources?):
https://www.reddit.com/r/StardewValley/comments/8y24kk/community_center_vs_jojamart/#bottom-comments
Also:
“Casual Games and the Work of Affect” by Audrey Anable