Stardew Valley Co-op: An intro to communism

Stardew Valley Co-op provides players with the ability to work together to rebuild and renovate a farm in a small town. At the beginning, the farm is covered with boulders, trees, weeds, etc. The player must clear out the garbage, plant and water crops, fish, hunt monsters, and everything else a farmer does to create one thing: commercial products to sell. In the game, you simply drop off all your goods in a box at the end of the day and overnight the items get ‘shipped’ away and the player is rewarded with gold. This gold can be used to buy more seeds, buy furniture and decoration for the farm, upgrade tools, among a plethora of other things. In single player, no one has access to your gold but you. In co-op however, all the players share the same pool of gold. This leads us to our discussion: communism within Stardew Valley Co-op.

Stardew Valley Co-op can be a great game. When playing with friends, there is often some communication, as described by Manninen, “to bring about a consensus through rational discussions under ideal speech conditions”. Usually, this takes the form of some sort of distribution of jobs: one player focuses on clearing the farm, another on planting crops, a third on farming Skull Cavern, and so on. This allows the farm to function more optimally. More importantly, there are usually some discursive actions “to establish a set of common norms for all participants”. This is vital in Stardew Valley Co-op. Going back to the shared pool of gold, it is important for there to be a certain level of agreement amongst the players on how the gold will be spent, a certain set of norms. For example, maybe a set of three players prioritizes upgrading tools first and buying vital supplies for the farm first, and only later do they spend any money on decorations.

However, if the players are missing these two steps described by Manninen, the game quickly deteriorates (much like Communism). In the discussion section where we played Stardew Valley Co-op, it was several of the players’ first experience with the game. This meant that they were not truly familiar with neither the mechanics nor the language of the game. Thus, there was no meaningful communication or discourse between the players. Some of the time, this was not directly detrimental—the farm did not function very efficiently but some crops still got planted, some fish caught, some space cleared. At other times, a player would spend some of the community gold on say, buying new floors for their cabin, instead of discussing it with the other players. This creates a free-rider problem in the truest sense—one player is able to spend all of the community’s hard-earned money on whatever they want without having to contribute to the earning of that money. This is a similar train of thought that most proponents of capitalism engage with when denouncing communism: if there is no inherent reward (e.g. more money) for participating in the community and working hard, people simply will not do it. This of course raises the debate about human nature and what not, but that is a bit too broad in scope for this blog post. Overall though, it is easy to see why some Stardew Valley Co-op games quickly devolve into a mad scramble for that bit of gold in the community pouch.