Throughout all the discussion we've been having all week about 'serious' games, and the way game mechanics materialize the sensations and messages these games are trying to say, I was curious at how or if Stardew Valley could fit into our serious game canon. While I originally saw it carrying into our co-op unit, I did feel like there was a serious message behind the game that was backed up by serious game mechanics. There was something serious in the tension between the arrival of JojaMart right by this pastoral landscape, but I couldn't quite put my finger on how that tension found itself in the gameplay of Stardew Valley. I grew up playing Animal Crossing and some titles in the Harvest Moon series, and I think I found my answer to Stardew's seriousness in considering how the game differs from these staple simulations. In both games, but notably in Animal Crossing, a common goal for many players is to discover means to maximize their wealth. Things like sourcing the best fish or bugs to pull in the highest profit or collecting and selling rare furniture and art are common means of achieving this goal. Though originally, I hadn't thought much about it, looking back at these childhood games, I wondered how a game about catching bugs and fish became so focused on growth of one's personal economy. Simply put, games that simulate farming or to an extent, collection, are often so heavily focused on using the collection mechanisms combined with a buying and selling model to improve one's game progress. Animal Crossing's main goals revolve around paying off a mortgage, or in later games, developing one's city with public works projects. Stardew Valley differed in a lot of ways, in that accumulating wealth never really seemed like a huge goal. There's a slowness in Stardew Valley that I actually really appreciate, especially as a college student. It's rare for us to get the chance to do 'mindless work', to play and explore a world without a specific motive, especially a financial one. In a lot of ways, I suppose that slowing down is a by-product of several of Stardew Valley's game mechanics. Things like overcomplicating the process of catching fish, setting deadlines for when you need to get to bed, and introducing an energy loss mechanism that actually does physically slow you down all taught me to be more patient with the game and to submit to its schedule and pace.
I'm sure people play these games in really unique ways, but I could definitely imagine some gamers focusing heavily on maximizing their finances and in turn, completing particular elements of the game faster, but at the end of the day, the game feels like something you would play to get away from the hustle of everyday life and escape to a world where things move much slower. The serious messaging could be a call to gamers to slow down the way they play games, to take advantage of the freedom a game offers and use it to slow down the trauma of day-to-day life. Even the inclusion of cooperative play seems to nod to players needing to find that joy in cooperation that games like animal crossing and harvest moon might not be able to include. So putting stardew at the intersection of co-op and serious games seemed to make perfect sense to me; though perhaps that's all justification for my purchasing and likely eventual devotion of the game.
I mentioned something similar in my own blog post. I believe that the open-ended nature of the game really allows for people to experience it at their own pace and in their own ways.
As for your point at the beginning, I don't know if that is enough to put stardew valley in the category of a serious game. In my opinion the game's purpose is not to simply teach its players to take life more slowly, there's more complexity than that, and what the game is saying at times is never really clear (if it's saying anything to begin with).
I'm glad I found your take on Stardew Valley as a slower, peaceful form of escapism. Having played games such as Starcraft, Overwatch, and League heavily through most of my Middle School/Highschool years, mechanics to me were components of a game that must be overcome. In that sense, escapism through those games was presented not as a gradual familiarization of a virtual world and a slow appreciation for all there was to explore, but rather through a frantic attempt to sync myself (mechanically) with the champions I play and the units I command. But Stardew Valley, as you mentioned, presented itself in a very different manner when I first picked it up. All the mechanics embedded within Stardew Valley to…
This is a really interesting thing to think about, as I've also been a pretty avid Animal Crossing player for a long time now, and always enjoyed how simple and unremarkable (in a good way!) everything in the game is. When I first encountered Stardew Valley, I could tell there was something hugely different about it compared to Animal Crossing, but I couldn't quite pin down what made the two games feel so disparate. It's definitely the emphasis on becoming rich, or at least constantly increasing how much money you have, that stands out to me now that you've brought it up. Almost every mechanic in Animal Crossing boils down to being a way to make money. It'd be interesting…
I really like this piece! I've played a lot of stardew and I think this hits the nail on the head for me. As someone who's work/career revolves around optimization, it's so nice to sit back and do 'mindless' yet seemingly productive work.
I wanted to add some context that really supports your argument. When coop first came out, there were a lot of subreddits and discord servers that planned to work together and basically min-max the game, see who can get the most money in a year as a group, etc. They asked for a way to kick people from their server because their projects were being ruined by trolls.
The developers actually refused. They started attaching the message…