Stardew Valley is a seemingly cosy, farming, and life sim that gets grindy supeeeeer fast for gamers who get over-ambitious (re: me), and especially for the Completionists. Released in 2016 by solo developer Eric Barone, aka ConcernedApe, Stardew Valley is amongst my top games on Steam, with a 672.3-hour play time since I first started playing it in late July 2024.
I observe a shared consensus within the Stardew Valley community that there’s no “wrong” way to play the game, and players can essentially choose how to go about their years as a corporate slave turned farmer.
Plenty of choices are given to players from the very beginning, starting from, of course, the basics, like your name, your appearance, and your preferred pet. If you’re crazy enough, you’re also given the choice to randomise your characters. I say crazy just because I tend to want my characters to be curated, creating them based on something I’m not but want to be. And from very early on, you get to choose what kind of farm you want to work in; there’s some agency there, as you get to make quite an important decision before the story even starts. You can choose a standard plot of land to design your own farm more freely, a land focused on fishing, foraging, animal farming, combat, or one that could give you a little taste of everything. Below is me randomising my Stardew character by clicking that little dice on the top left, and you can see the farm options on the right.
From here, you follow what’s very clearly a (quite well-written, I might say) narrative. Fair warning, there are spoilers here for those who have not started their Stardew journey.
You’ve spent a long time being a corporate slave for JojaMart, a supermarket corporation that you’ll encounter once again in Pelican Town, the town in Stardew Valley that you’ll be living in. You’re tired, you’re probably burnt out, and it seems you are itching for something more, or at least something different. You open your office desk drawer, and see a letter written by your grandfather, who has passed away and left his farm to you for when you decide to leave modern life.
You decided (or more so, the game made you decide) to leave, and you take the scenic route to Stardew Valley. There, you meet villagers, some of whom you can romance, and you start your farming life.
Here is where the lines between narrative and game mechanics start to blur. I have recently learned the different lenses in which we can view games, the first using narrative theory, aka narratology, and the second being game theory, aka ludology. Narrative theory drives players to look for meaning in the media they consume, in this context, the games you play, and sort of the why the game leads you to play a certain way, the message the game is trying to convey, and what you are meant to take away. Meanwhile, game theory focuses more on the mechanics, the how you play, and the what you’re trying to achieve as you play.
Neither of these two lenses is better or simpler than the other, though I must admit I’ve learned more about narratology from currently taking my master’s in writing, so I might lean into that aspect a little more. As I talk about these two approaches, bear in mind these questions: What is it that we’re trying to achieve when we play Stardew Valley, and is it any different from what the game expects from us?
We can clearly answer the first question by looking at Stardew Valley through a ludological lens (though I can only offer surface-level knowledge for now, apologies). Stardew Valley is goal-driven and somewhat rule-bound. The game offers players agency to run their farm however they want, live their farmer life however they want, romance or befriend or defriend whomever they want. Players are perhaps only limited by the hours of the day, starting at 6 am and ending at 2 am, and by the fact that the game is driven by quests that players would need to follow one step at a time. Not doing these quests would stop players from going to certain locations and from progressing in the story.
There’s somewhat of a timeline you have to follow, or else there’ll be features in the game that you won’t be able to access. You would have to do quests to, say, gain access to tools such as the hoe and the fishing rod, and would need to progress to improve the quality of these tools.
There is no denying that the game gives players sooooooo much freedom, but if we think about the best “outcome” designed by the game for players to achieve, what would that be?
Perfection.
“Perfection” in Stardew Valley means players have reached 100% of the content the game has to offer, the “perfection tracker” accessible once you are able to enter Qi’s Walnut Room on Ginger Island. “Perfection” implies an end goal that players can get to. Aside from Perfection, players will also have their grandfather’s spirit come visit them by Spring year 3 to evaluate how well they’ve run their farm. If players don’t make enough progress, he’ll express disappointment, but if players make great progress, he’ll be pleased and can peacefully “move on,” believing we are responsible enough to hold onto his legacy.
When we become a player seeking to reach perfection, the focus of “what does the game want us to achieve?” becomes the goal that requires us to be grindy and mechanical; we have to pay attention to all the items we need to craft, the recipes we have to make, and the fruits and veggies we have to sell. We focus on all these things we must do, and our character’s story, gets slightly put on the sidelines.
Looking at Stardew Valley through a narratological lens makes answering the questions a littleeeee complicated.
With any consumable media, there exists a relationship between the author and the reader; in the context of gaming, the developer/creator and the player. In Stardew Valley, the former would be ConcernedApe and the latter the players. In narratology, aside from the real author and the real reader, there exists the implied author and the implied reader. To get your head out of the bind as you read this, completely detach and separate the real and the implied. Focus on the implied, and remember that they are not necessarily the same. The real author may share the same values as the implied author, as do the real reader and the implied reader, but this is not always the case.
The implied author is like an invisible hand that guides us through the narrative in a way that allows us to perceive the meaning of the narrative the way it wants us to. A simpler way to put it might be an imaginary author whose norms and values are expressed through the narrative. The implied author positions readers to understand the narrative in a specific way, and the implied reader (which I might refer to as the implied player from this point on) is the “ideal player” who completely understands and is on board with said norms and values. As a player, you can either be that ideal, implied player, or you can be a resistant player. When playing Stardew Valley, it is very possible to refuse the role of the implied player.
Remember when I said there seems to be no “wrong” way to play Stardew Valley? And remember when I said something about the game making us make decisions? I argue that if we view Stardew Valley using the theory of implied author/reader, there might be a right way to play the game, and it is the implied author who drives the implied player to make the right decisions. Bear with me.
Our corporate life at Joja represents the idea of capitalism, and from the very start, the narrative of Stardew Valley has us moving away from that life. As our story progresses in Pelican Town, we get to choose community vs. capitalism. We are made to choose between completing bundles to repair the Community Centre and gain access to certain areas of the town, or buying a Joja membership to fix those areas using money and turning the Community Centre into a JojaMart warehouse. It is pretty obvious which choice favours capitalism over community.
We encounter the thing we escaped once again, and we are given the opportunity to return to that familiar, or to focus on developing something brand new, the Community Centre, representing the Stardew Valley community.
I have played the game both ways (feeling super guilty when I played the Joja route for the sake of getting the Steam achievement).
If you’ve played Stardew and consistently converse with the villagers like I do, you can notice the different dialogues that appear when you choose different routes. Townspeople like Pierre and Mayor Lewis express disappointment and sadness when the Community Centre gets demolished, and plenty of the townspeople express happiness when the Community Centre magically returns to what it was like during its glory days.
While it is possible for players to stay somewhat anti-social by interacting with the townspeople as minimally as possible (for instance, strictly only for quest-related interactions), I believe the narrative of Stardew Valley hinges on the relationships between our character and the townspeople, whether good or bad. The story can only progress in relation to the NPCs. The narrative of our character escaping corporate slavery is only the focus at the beginning of the story, and the focus shifts to the character development of the NPCs and how our actions and decisions impact the community. If a player decides never to leave their farm, they might even get a letter from the Mayor saying they have not contributed to the town at all.
With how the game frames Pelican Town’s community and the impact our decisions bring, I believe that the implied player would be one who adheres and believes in building community and maintaining connection instead of giving in to the big bad capital c Capitalism. With this view in mind, the “right” way to play Stardew Valley would be to choose the Community Centre storyline (and having to watch Pierre kick Morris into the void) over the JojaMart storyline, focusing on community. Choosing otherwise would make one a resistant player.
Simple. Done…
… not really.
The values of the implied author can’t stop there. Considering the community centre bundles can be completed by the end of Year 1 if you try hard enough, maybe more realistically by Year 2, that is pretty early on in the game. You have only just begun accessing the Calico Desert; you have not even accessed Ginger Island yet. There is still much more content to enjoy after that.
Let’s imagine we are the implied player, and we have repaired the Community Centre. We have escaped the big bad JojaMart that managed to chase us even after we stopped being a Joja employee. What next? We continue doing the quests, we continue building our farm, and if we choose to, we can romance a bachelor, get married, have a family. Why? How?
M-O-N-E-Y.
Money. There really is no escaping money in Stardew Valley. Earning money even becomes a Steam achievement. So, is there really a way to completely escape capitalism?
The game’s mechanics are built on a market system. You need to sell items to gain money, which you’ll need to buy seeds, buy farm animals, build property, upgrade tools, and so on. One of the first things Mayor Lewis tells us after we arrive is that we can sell things by dropping them in the shipping bin, and he continues to remind us a couple of times after that.
This is what you have to keep doing after finishing the Community Centre/Joja storyline to continue the game. You can attempt an anti-capitalist and self-sufficient run, which many players have done, but there is really no way of not participating in a capitalistic system. You can only try to be as un-capitalistic as possible. Let’s also not forget the end goal of reaching “Perfection,” which I think would be impossible or near impossible when you play the game this way. In short, it is impossible to escape capitalism.
This saddening and heart-wrenching fact does not negate the implied author’s values of being anti-corporation, though. So, just like in real life, Stardew Valley is plagued by capitalism, but we as players can still, in some way, contribute to the betterment of our community if we choose to. This would be the “right” way to play Stardew Valley according to the implied author, and the implied player would agree.
Like I said, I would lean heavily on the narratological side of things, but it is mainly because I am not quite knowledgeable in ludology just yet, and I don’t want to mislead anyone in any way if I fail to understand stuff correctly. Maybe it is also the fact that, as you can see from my Death and Taxes post, I take both fact and fiction pretty seriously, and I believe every fictional work to always be connected to culture somehow.
Though it seems narratology and ludology are complete opposites, I don’t believe they are black and white, and games, like Stardew Valley, exist in a spectrum of the two.
xo Reiko
Leave a Reply