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.