Although I have played a great deal of Stardew Valley, I had never had the chance to play on the Coop mode. This new part of the gameplay experience changed my perspective on the message of Stardew and highlighted how much of the experience of playing is determined by autonomy.
The premise of Stardew Valley is essentially that you got tired of corporate drudgery with Jojo Corp and decide to start over on a farm, embracing the simple life. You create your own farm with your own goals, be them making the most beautiful farm, accumulating the most money, or becoming the most desired bachelor/bachelorette in town. You spend 3+ game years carefully crafting the world you want – truly, you are trying to find the kind of rustic independence not accessible in the “real world”. So, what does it mean to introduce new players in a cooperative? You all share a pot of money, but at a certain point you lose much of the autonomy in the independent version. Even if all the players agree on a common goal – say, trying to romance Harvey or catch the biggest fish – the player subjects themselves to a rule outside of their autonomous choice. Moreover, even if one player becomes bored by the goal, they themselves cannot shift the trajectory of the game writ large.
This new cooperative element integrated into Stardew Valley: Coop is a crucial tool to represent a different theme in Stardew Valley: the importance of cooperation in a society. It is no accident that Stardew Valley takes place with a town nearby. The player is choosing to integrate themselves into the society through economic, friendly, and romantic interactions. The decisions the player makes – choosing to buy a JojoMart membership, thus destroying the community center, for example – affect the entire community. Yet, because it’s a game, the player cares less about the impact of their actions on the NPCs unless they buy into the magic circle of Stardew. The cooperative mode circumvents the need to buy into the “reality” of Stardew by forcing the player to contend with the impact of their actions on other real players and vice-versa. The frustration of someone spending all your money or the inability to go to the next day because the other player stays out until 2 AM are a representation of your dependency of the people in your own community. The importance of actions over verbal communication is underscored by the unwieldy and difficult chat feature. It is far easier to communicate through actions, which is the intent of one of the messages behind Stardew Valley.
Stardew Valley: Coop is not as sophisticated as a game such as Between or Journey, both of which games that take the concept of communicating solely through action to an extreme and artistic point. Yet, the decision to include a cooperative mode when there could have just as easily been solely an individual game was as much an artistic decision as it was a business decision. As Jagoda notes, “the twenty-first century videogame adopts the space and time of the transnational Internet” and there are increasingly more networked videogames on the market instead of single-player games. The growth of the internet and a connected world allows game developers to explore and expand upon different themes with different tools. Stardew Valley’s networked function brings to the fore a far more subtle theme in the single-player version and thus allows for a deeper understanding of autonomy and an individual’s role in society.
Multiplayers games such as Stardew Valley are largely player-centric and depend on the environment in which people play them. Whether the players are playing the game in the same room or at a distance changes how players interact with the game. Each group often looked at other groups' screens to see what they were doing. One looks at what another group is doing and finds out what he can do in the game. In a way, when multiple players are playing in the same room, they operate as a larger whole--whatever one player discovers is soon discovered by other players. For example, when the group next to mine found that one can fish by the pier, my group immediately tried…
I would agree that playing Stardew Valley individually brings the player a sense of autonomy. One thing to further the argument of autonomy and cooperation is that perhaps playing in Coop mode puts a different weight on the idea of "autonomy". I would agree that playing single player can give one a great sense of freedom, autonomy, and control of the simulation. However, playing Coop can do the same things just in different ways and I think the feeling of autonomy lies within the decision to break away from collective decisions. What types of feelings do players get when they decide to break the laws established by the Coop play? How do those decisions help the player establish the "self"…
It's interesting to note the way real players affect the player's capacity to care! While it's true that Stardew Valley finds a lot of popularity as a life sim (i.e. its target audience likely already cares about the game world), I find that multiplayer does add another dimension through introducing certain chaotic elements. Other humans are far less predictable; and even when one cares about the game world, they are generally in control of the game world at all times, making it easy to hold a certain indifference or imperiousness towards it. That, I feel, is the key distinction between in-game and out-game interactions: they are uncontrollable variables that one is forced to surrender partial control to, allowing for a…
I really like the point that you make about how you no longer have to buy into this "reality" in the coop mode, as your actions now have an impact on other, real players. The coop mode adds a new level of procedural rhetoric to the game as a whole, allowing us to experience a new set of rules that influence how we think about not only escaping from society, but our place within it. You point this out really well throughout your piece, and I like how you mention specific examples such as what happens when other players stay up too late or buy a JojoMart membership. I wonder if you expanded more on specific instances where you now…