On Stardew Valley, Loading Screens, and the Smell of Rain
Thoughts on gaming, grief, and graphics.
Stardew Valley is the perfect landscape for self-contemplation. I have spent much of the last year trying to understand why I like playing video games so much more than I would enjoy living in them, and I think I’ve found my answer in the press of the WD keys as my little pixellated self runs across the town square in Stardew Valley. From my understanding of video game theory, video games are almost always set in worlds we would enjoy living in. Even if these worlds are postapocalyptic, even if they involve engaging in melee combat with random strangers, for those five minutes or half an hour that is a world you would want to be in. So say all four essays I’ve skimmed on it and the one (1) conversation I’ve had with a dear family friend who teaches video game design to undergraduates, all of whom are much better informed on the matter than I am.
Video games are essentially wish fulfillment. They give us powerups that are unattainable or at least challenging to obtain in real life: they make us able to fly, they make us beautiful, they make us able to do backflips without snapping our spines in two. Perhaps they present us with challenges along the way—creepers to blow up our angular homes, ravens to eat our crops, other players aiming cyberguns at us from around the corner—but, if we try, we can eventually get what we want. Real life is frequently not so fair. Even when it is that fair, it is certainly not that simple.
As of September 25, 2024, I have amassed 391.1 hours of playtime on Stardew Valley. I am not an avid gamer by 2020s standards; my parents, both in their seventies, have a quiet disdain for video games, and I grew up offline enough that I feel a visceral guilt about basically any on-screen pastimes. Yet I was captivated first by Minecraft in my preteen years, then by Stardew Valley near the end of high school, which I picked up at an obsessive level during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Throughout university, it became a more uneven hobby. My first months on campus, I played a lot of Stardew Valley late at night—usually sometime between 1 and 3 a.m., when I still thought my insomnia was vaguely cool and aspirational rather than embarrassing evidence of a lack of self-control. Then, in my third year, I moved to the UK to study abroad, not knowing anyone in Europe, much less the small medieval town I was supposed to start calling home. My first month there, I spent what I conservatively estimate to be twenty hours a day playing the game. The lack of structured time in UK higher education and the absence of friends at my new university, alongside an existential crisis, meant that I was—for what felt like the first time in twenty years—free to do whatever brought the unsocial bits of myself most joy. Apparently, that was Stardew Valley. I played through two years of the game in a couple weeks, maybe less, through a haze of university cafe-bought meal deals and brief walks to get my bearings. Something about the seasons passing in Stardew Valley, the reliable building-up of my farm and relationships as my real life seemed so uncertain, endeared the game to me.
That brief obsessive period was not to last. Soon, I developed a healthy relationship with the outdoors (although UK trees still seem so small), a fantastic friend group, and a dissertation topic that effectively guided my third year. Eventually, I started dating my current partner and started thinking more seriously about graduate school. I was lucky enough to develop a support system that would help me settle into this notoriously unfriendly country, should I decide to return. Stardew Valley faded into the background, a coping mechanism which I was fond of but no longer needed quite so badly.
If I were to lean into the philosophy major I spent four arduous years trying to do well at, I would say that my love for the game (the small bit of that love that went beyond the pleasure of playing) stemmed from my interest in questions of ethics and fulfillment: Stardew Valley requires that you be—or at least play as—a kind person, if not an exceptional one. You need to do things, real repetitive labor, and be thoughtful and intentional about how you spend your time. You need to contribute to your community, even as your character recovers from the grief of losing their grandfather as well as the daily indignities of capitalism, etc. It is hard to win the game, and the closest you get is at the end of the second year, when the spirit of your character’s grandfather comes back to let you know how good of a job you’ve done according to a fairly holistic metric that includes your farm, your skills, and your relationships. There is meaning here, in terms both immediate and academic.
I was never a very good philosophy major, and have now turned entirely to studying literature (you can only read so much Kant), but I was struck this past year by reading Carol Rovane’s work on the value of projects. One of the great ethicists of our time said in characteristically spare and engaging prose what a video game had been subtly but effectively communicating for years. In her essay “Reductionism, Self-constitution, and the Moral Significance of Personal Identity,” Rovane argues that “there must be something worth doing whose pursuit requires striving to achieve such unity within particular boundaries – this would be a unifying project” (Rovane, Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons, e.d. Andrea Sauchelli, pg. 235). In other words, we are driven toward a unity of thought—planning, reassessment and adaptation, and determination—by having something we consider worth it. We become ourselves, individuals with agency and commitment, when we have something we value enough to motivate us away from our typically fragmentary existence.
This may seem intuitive, but it was Stardew Valley that really moved me to feel it viscerally. What makes life worth constant reconsidering, constant persistence, the perpetual inconvenient reordering of daily monotony around a far-off, amorphous vision of the future? Well…in joyful terms, exactly what makes a day of the game worth playing: the promise of immediate benefits like a fresh-caught Bream or a pixellated cherry blossom floating on the spring breeze or a conversation with sculptor Leah (my current in-game belle of choice). And, alongside this, the promise of longer projects: reaching the lowest level of the mines, which will demand labor for new tools as well as pre-emptive farming for sustenance in earlier seasons; marriage and children perhaps with aforementioned dreamy sculptor, which will require I learn her favorite gifts and come drop by to have charming conversations; successful completion of the second year, which will require planning and balance. These long projects are punctuated by those small joys, which are not to be neglected. A full life is worth it entirely because of those small joys. The bigger projects are just milestones along the way.
This felt simple. In my worst days of junior year, when everything felt a bit hopeless and bad, I would dream in the Harvest Moon-inspired art style of Stardew Valley, in hopes that it would bring me some comfort. Even when I could exactly recreate the world, it would still bring me almost no comfort. To play the game on my laptop was to find reassurance and safety, but to track the same paths in my dreams was jarring, unpleasant, and unfulfilling. I concluded that I had outgrown the game, that my love for it while awake stemmed from nostalgia rather than “true” enjoyment, and that I needed to find something that was as fulfilling awake as asleep. It still brought me so much joy to play, though, and I knew I could retreat to it when I was sad—it was one of the few pieces of entertainment that never felt soulless.
Why is it better to play the game than to feel as though you’re actually in it? That might be a personal quirk, might be a widespread phenomenon—from what I’ve read, people seem divided. I think that it might be a matter of what players think games are for, but I always believed myself as much of a vicarious game-player as any. My Sims are always immortal, with magic powers, a vestige of my twelve-year-old self. They will outlive me, unless I can hire someone to steamroll my laptop hard drive first (any volunteers?).
This came to a head for me a bit over a year ago, with the death of my paternal grandmother. We were very close throughout my life—I remember, very acutely, discussing plans during her final days while at a May Ball at the end of my year abroad (May Balls are ornate university-sponsored parties at the end of every academic year). I sat down on the steps of Wolfson College, champagne growing warm against my calf, and wiped at my eyes, which were leaking blue eyeshadow (the theme was futuristic steampunk). I tried to think of the moment as a project, well before I’d read Rovane’s essay. Behind me, my girlfriend fended off a tipsy fellow outside an absinthe truck; two young men in the year below me waved genial hellos as they passed; a band set up to play on the big stage as the smoke machine started to billow. I felt very much as though my entire main quest had changed. If I am grown up now, that was the moment I became this way. If I’m not grown up yet, I’d hate to see what will finally get me there.
This is all to say that at the beginning of my senior year, freshly bereaved and in a long-distance queer relationship and applying to attend grad school in a foreign country etc. etc. etc., I was not in the best shape I’ve ever been. I decided to open my laptop and power up Stardew Valley again, in the hopes that something about the game would connect with the painful hollow I felt at the pit of my stomach. Besides, the game begins with a young person inheriting their grandfather’s farm; I spent many summers as a kid visiting the farm my grandmother had grown up on in Missouri. I thought maybe the game that had provided solace during a pandemic and two massive moves would do something to alleviate the total emptiness of loss.
The game traditionally opens with a cheerful melody and birds that fly across the screen, and then you can hit the “LOAD” button, which is decorated with a very pleasant-looking pink melon. Once you select which save file you want to load (in my case, the ancient one that’s on year four, because I like continuing to win at things), your day begins with a rooster crowing outside your character’s house. Your character gets out of bed to greet their spouse and children, then leaves the house to a lovely morning soundtrack and proceeds to farm maintenance or fishing or mining.
I didn’t even let the rooster make it halfway through its wakeup call. I was too tired. I shut my laptop, set it down on my dresser, curled up under the comforter and went fitfully to sleep. I stayed essentially that way for about three months, somehow managing to go to class and do my work and call my friends, but all the while trying very hard to get back to the feeling I have always had stepping out the front door in Stardew Valley: energy, hope, knowledge that the day has something in store. I didn’t just not want to live in the game—I didn’t even want to look at it. It wasn’t because there was any lie in it; unlike books recommended to me about grief and family, it didn’t feel as though anyone was trying to sell me something. I like Stardew Valley precisely because it provides space. It is a way to be alone without being alone, a way to have tasks to complete without the stakes feeling quite like life or death.
In “Reading the Game: Stardew Valley,” Jason Sheehan says that “What you get out of the experience depends heavily on what baggage you're carrying when you first climb on that bus and take the long ride to the coast.” This feels very true. At seventeen, I wanted a little escape from stress, a way to feel as though I had completed some activity, even though it was useless to grow fruit that was only real while my computer remained charged. I didn’t want to step out of my life into the game because I liked my life better—not because it was particularly perfect but because I liked myself, and enjoyed my own company enough to not want to sacrifice it for the sake of a gentle digital world. Even if I could have stepped into the screen, I wouldn’t have, because as Thomas Nagel pointed out in ‘74, you’ve got to give up your subjective experience to be anyone else, even if it’s someone you want to be.
At twenty-one, I didn’t want to be myself at all. Never mind being in the real world. I practiced a degree of self-hatred and general loathing that has been unseen since the earliest Warped Tour bands threw mic stands into the crowd. The sunlit, verdant world of Stardew Valley couldn’t fix that even if I wanted it to. Playing through a game whose message was “It’s going to be okay” felt untrue, and worse, it felt lonely. As a kid, it’s satisfying to call things out for being liars and fakes, but Stardew Valley was not lying or faking—it was just reassuring a player who was entirely resistant to being reassured.
Now I am back to playing the game, although more seldom than I did when I was younger. I wonder if I will ever be obsessed with anything again the way I was growing up, when I jumped from special interest to special interest like a game of leapfrog. What I do know is that I still prefer playing the game to actually being in it, and feel no immediate urge to run away to a farm in the Pacific Northwest, although if my dear grandmother had left me one I wouldn’t be, like, objecting, or anything. There is some utility now to the distance between myself and my digital self, some room to allow the unconscious to expand. It allows me to not examine every little minute detail of the way I think. I can sit comfortably with my various selves, including the one that is still doubled over clutching at her diaphragm, because grief really does stick. That distance feels important, and it is facilitated by the confines of the life my Stardew Valley character plays. She is constrained by the town’s borders, and instead of dreaming to leave them for the big city nearby, as NPC Sebastian does, she tills the soil of her farm and takes good care of her ghosts.
I hope that when I also take the long ride to that coast, I can sit next to her.