Over the past couple months I’ve been playing Stardew Valley. The game had its ten year anniversary recently, and I saw a concert where they performed music from the game, and I got nostalgic and kinda curious to see what they’d put into the game since the last time I played. I have a pattern with this game, right – I’ll start a new game, play for maybe forty or fifty hours, do a bunch of stuff, and then one day I’ll put it down and not really pick it up again. I have four or five saves each petering out sometime in the second year. As a simulator, there’s not really a defined end-point to Stardew. There are major tasks – refurbishing the community center, getting married, building up your house and farm – but no strict narrative end. If you wanted, you could play for dozens or even hundreds of in-game years, watching the calendar tick up while the ageless inhabitants of Pelican Town live uncorrupted by time. Your children will never grow old and your cows will live forever. In a way, it’s a little unceremonious to step away from Stardew Valley. There’s never really closure or completion. It doesn’t come as the natural conclusion of a narrative arc, you just – stop. As a result, your farm always feels left in the lurch. This most recent game, I have two pet dinosaurs that I was sort of hoping might grow bigger, and I’m still working through the very specific requests from the raccoon family south of the farm, and I haven’t been to Ginger Island yet – I finished the community center and unlocked Willy’s boat, but I have to gather all this hardwood, and I just – I just put it down and stopped playing. Stardew is a game that you exit in media res.

And I was thinking a little about that dynamic – at first I was toying with writing a comparative piece comparing Stardew to The Shepherd’s Life, a memoir I’ve read recently. The Shepherd’s Life is an autobiography about a shepherd in the Lake Country. It’s about what it means to work on the land that your ancestors have worked for hundreds of years. It’s about farming, manual labour, rearing sheep – the cycle of life is a key part of the tale, as each generation of sheep layers new genes into the herd. It’s about death, too – with each new season part of the herd dies off, from old age or illness or the snow. New life is paired with new death: the wheel spins, inexorably. I was thinking about comparing that quite grounded, historically situated farm story against the playful timelessness of Stardew Valley. That type of comparison has been made before – for instance, in ‘Winter and Death in Harvest Moon‘, writer Holly Nielsen makes essentially the same point with different titles. She compares Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town against its 3D remake, arguing that the original feels more real, more true to the turn of the seasons, partly because the animals grow old and die. “The plants got to have their winter, but nothing else did. A lack of death made [the remake] feel lifeless.” You could level the same complaint at Stardew Valley. For a pastoral game, it’s very clean. Nothing gets sick or dies. Nielsen writes that “Winter is the time of hibernation and death, a necessary moment of fallow in preparation for the cycle to begin again.” In Stardew Valley, winter is softened. Nothing dies. While there are seasons, much of the game sits outside of time. The Shepherd’s Life illustrates the same point at greater length. It dives into the difficulty and grief of farming, into the winter feelings, in a way that Stardew sort of skates over, and by comparison Stardew feels weaker for that absence.

Or – maybe not weaker, but more obviously bubble-wrapped. It’s a little less confrontational, a little less rooted in the turn of the seasons. It’s a cozy game, not a game trying to simulate the full spectrum of farming experience. It’s a game for when you’re sick. There’s something productive in the comparison, but I’m leery about suggesting that the game ought to be something other than what it is. A lot of criticism of Stardew Valley seems almost to stem from frustration that the game isn’t modelling a socialist utopia. Cassandra Roxburgh writes that Stardew replaces “corporate capitalism” with an “agrarian form of capitalism”. She has some interesting observations, but ultimately descends into writing fanfiction about how she wishes the game would have gone: “The obvious alternative would be for the community to rally alongside you to seize the means of production, especially since you already own the farm. It would be very simple to create a system whereby everyone equally exchanges their labor and skills to develop the community.” Moral judgements, for these critics, often replace aesthetic judgements in a way that I find uncomfortable. Nielsen describes herself as “guilty” of fantasizing about an idyllic pastoral lifestyle, of romanticizing agriculture and farm labour. I don’t know if that’s something you can be guilty of.

Something that strikes me about Stardew Valley on this playthrough is how the game is built on practices of home-making. That’s not a new observation, per se – the whole premise of the game is that you build up your farm, arranging crops and animals however you like. You can design your character, choose whether you want a cat or a dog, lay down pathways, craft barrels or kegs for making jams and juices and beer. You can decorate your house with furniture, pick the wallpaper, the flooring. Among the villagers, you can pick your friends and your eventual partner. The villagers seem to have little interest in romancing each other – as part of the game’s timelessness, the romanceable NPCs remain available throughout the game, and even after you’re married, they stay single. The key dynamic in Stardew is choice – the player’s choice. Often in discussions of the game, a contrast is drawn between the urban corporate city and the rural agricultural countryside. You flee a desk job at Joja Corp and overthrow their supermarket chain in favour of the local grocer. It’s framed as a game about capitalism vs anti-capitalism – with your farming lifestyle as the rural ideal. Critiques of the game, like Roxburgh’s, often take that starting point and consider how capitalist networks of consumption and profit margin marble through your gameplay, undermining the supposed message of anti-capitalism and sustainability. Personally, I’m not sure that’s the most productive framing.

In the first instance, I think some of these critics skate past the implications of their own gameplay practices. Writing about the early game, where progress is often slow, Roxburgh writes “You better work yourself to the bone to eke out every piece of efficiency from those days.” I mean, alternately – wild suggestion – you could just take it easy? The whole fantasy of Stardew Valley is that you don’t need money to live. You never need to pay taxes or bills, and you only need to eat if you want to restore energy to chop down extra trees or something. The financial pressures that govern our day-to-day lives are absent. If you want to rush around like a maniac, you can – but you don’t have to. That’s a choice. There are no consequences if you take it really slow. There is a lot of freedom in the late game, when you have piles of energy and you’ve automated most of your farm labour, but getting to that point is sort of the arc of the whole game. Stardew Valley is a game about successively unlocking additional choices. If you get ore from the mines, you can make sprinklers so you don’t have to water your plants every morning, saving a bit of time and energy for doing other things. That’s a choice you can make. You have to go and get the ore, and that takes time – you’ve got to build up your mining skills, your combat – and that’s the core of the gameplay loop. It’s about goofing around unlocking things that you might like to use on your farm. Some people – certain people – see the optimisation as a challenge, and try and make millions of dollars every day, and turn it all into some capitalist hyper-optimised hellscape. But nobody asked you to do that, and you’re not really better off for acting in that way. Money doesn’t really mean much in Stardew. Maybe you’ll unlock certain choices faster, but as with Project Highrise, money is a framework for scaffolding progression and not an end in itself.

Also, if you are trying to optimise your farm to make as much money as possible, it’s usually pretty ugly. Economically it makes sense to cram as many chickens as possible into your henhouse. I don’t like cramming them in: I have two chickens, two ducks, a rabbit, and a couple of tiny dinosaurs. I could fit up to sixteen animals in the henhouse, and I have seven. That’s all I want. I could build my crops closer together, have more sprinklers, more kegs, I could restrict myself to the produce with the best ROI – but I don’t want to. Instead, I line the trees with flowers. I water them by hand each morning – I tried putting sprinklers around them, but it didn’t look nice, so I took them down. Watering the flowers by hand takes longer. It’s inefficient. It eats into my day, and it eats into my energy. I have about a hundred and forty flowers each season. It’s been my little ritual. I could automate it, but I like doing it myself. It takes between seven and twelve days for them to mature, depending on the time of year, and at the end of the season I pull them all up and gift them to the townspeople. Stardew is a game about home-making. It’s about the fantasy of choice. That’s really the strongest contrast I see between Joja Corp and working on the farm: on the farm, you choose what you’d like to do. You are surplus labour, freed from economic concerns, freed from a boss and corporate interests, freed from sitting at a desk on somebody else’s time working in somebody else’s business. All of the aesthetic and decorative choices are part of that. Stardew Valley is a game about your increasing ability to determine the shape of your own life. It’s about capitalism vs anti-capitalism, sure, in part, but more pointedly within that I think it’s about choice vs control. Stardew is a fantasy of agency. You can pick your house, choose your wallpaper, buy some animals, put down some crops, and then if you want, you can spend all your time fishing with Willy. The game won’t punish you. It’s your choice. There is a certain aimlessness within that – the game lacks a certain momentum, it doesn’t really push you towards an end – but that’s part of its appeal. It’s not a bounded game. It’s a fantasy of freedom. It’s a game that invites you to make yourself at home.