Fan Ethnography: Fan Interactions and the Virtual Third Culture of Stardew Valley
Stardew Valley is an indie video game that has sold over 15 million copies as of September 2021. When you feel the stress piling on, this video game is designed to help people relax and slow down. Based on the renowned Harvest Moon, Stardew is a farming simulator, dating game and adventure RPG all in one. Stardew was developed solely by Eric Barone, aka ConcernedApe, and released in 2016. Beginning a new game, you are asked to create a character, choosing a few preset clothing options, pick a cat or a dog, and name your new farm. The game drops your character into an office cubicle where the environment is so harsh, your neighbor is a skeleton. Worked themselves to death.
Depressing.
And that would be your fate too if not for plot armor. You remember a letter given to you by your 8-bit grandfather. Why store this letter at work, I’m not sure? A sweet moment passes, and you are now the proud owner of a run-down farm. The instruction on the letter did say to wait, although I imagine your grandfather thought you’d crack sooner. And so, now you are off on an adventure.
That may be the beginning of a character’s journey, but what about the player? Many will turn to the internet, where one can be inundated with information and ideals from the entire world. Miriam Sobré-Denton, PhD, teacher of intercultural communication, cosmopolitanism, critical communication pedagogy, was published in 2015 on virtual intercultural bridgework. Here she discusses “virtual cosmopolitanism” which can be “viewed as cosmopolitanism that is facilitated by mediated social spaces, in which cultural and social capital may be transmitted through social media networks, allowing for a greater transnational spread of ideas than corporeal cosmopolitanism.”
Her particular interest lies in “mobilizing such virtual cosmopolitan spaces to engage in intercultural and trans-local spaces for social justice advocated for by cosmopolitanism’s notion of ethical global citizenship.” Her paper was written about one year prior to the games release, and as such we could have watched her research fulfil itself.
Many times, on the fan forums such as Reddit we can see a question posed in such a way that there is an expected answer. Some people go as far as to supply links to mods that have already been created, ones that give op exactly what they were looking for (u/OverdueSauce). Plenty of the replies are in the same vein, today’s communities are looking to spread their own brand of social justice. They want woke, on trend, non-offensive gameplay.
The internet is a mishmash of people telling you what to think. An example of how the game has been rhetorically changed is the narrative of the storyline. The prevailing perception of people is that the game is very open to the LGBT+ community and is praised for its progressiveness. You can date any of the available bachelors, male or female. Heck you can date all of them at the same time, just remember to keep a lucky rabbit’s foot in your inventory. The wedding for same sex couples even has a cute little stumble during the speech (Wilson).
And yet here is an argument laying out how the game at its core is based on a perceived hetero norm. Adrienne Stallings, one of my fellow students, shared with me her thoughts and we talked about the lack of queerness and heterosexuality of the villagers. We discussed about how the default of the villagers is hetero, and how the pursuit from the player affects their settings.
This was very interesting for me because of the discussions in online communities. People are pushing their social agendas on this game, when it has a very clear setting, small north-east farming community. This is the type of community when back in the day they needed to fight for survival, there probably weren’t a lot a new people coming in which correlates to the lack of diversity but also meant procreating, i.e., hetero relationships (Hunter).
Virtual Spaces
Of course, not all virtual spaces are about spreading their brand of love, but also the pure enjoyment of the game. There are a ton of fan-made challenges, contests, and people just shouting into the void “I love it.” During the COVID-19 pandemic, people were trapped inside, and many turned Stardew Valley, playing and watching. Twitch is an online platform that players of the game were using to stream their personal gameplay while simultaneously chatting with their audience. Kayla Sims, aka Lilsimsie, is one of my favorite streamers, who plays a variety of games. She is known for her wholesome gameplay and chaotic speed builds. Kayla graduated college during the pandemic with a History Major, but she and her fiancée (who she met thru streaming OwO) both play Stardew Valley. Kayla participated in the official Stardew Valley Speed run Contest in September 2021, and her team won (moresimsie)!
Let’s look at the rise of Twitch gaming in the face of the pandemic and depression. Fändriks recently ran a study in 2018, a thesis asking about depressed people’s game choices. Stardew Valley was the overwhelming choice of those looking for a distraction from their everyday lives. When depressed, people will choose games that let them escapes from their problems in the real world. Of course, if you were feeling disconnected from the real world or were looking for a different kind of motivation there are other games to choose, but by far, Stardew Valley was the game people turned to for relaxation. COVID-19 has only accelerated the popularity of online gaming platforms, although there is little research to date. COVID imposed immense psychological burdens, feelings of loneliness, and social isolation. Consequently, Twitch viewership spiked after the pandemic hit (Scerbakov).
Think about it this way, many early studies framed videogames around a “medium as ideological training for future participation in a computerized workplace.” Pruett suggests the “contemporary stagnation of postindustrial economies,” i.e., the pandemic in this example, increased the rate that videogames, players, and game designers themselves are not playing as preparation for work but in preparation for underemployment. They believe that videogames provide “effective relief from the associated stresses and enable feelings of productivity, accomplishment, and social significance that are unavailable in the form of actual labor.”
Interacting online with other people keeps the game fresh for me. Every once in a while, I’ll come across some too cute and wholesome content, like there was a guy who created a popup book to propose marriage, who of course said yes. Other times, it’ll seem like some terrible post about humanity and as I’m shaking my head I notice, “Oh wait, its about that game.”
Honestly, the fan interaction on social media might be the best part of the game for me. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen a post in the past year talking about how they don’t have anyone close in their life who would appreciate their joy in completing a difficult quest or their proud of what they made, but they needed to share it somewhere. People online are always asking each other “How do I do this? Where do I find that?” The answer is usually given freely, and players often encourage each other to explore the wiki and the forums. There is always something cool that I haven’t heard before. It’s inspiring for me to see that kind of stuff. I want to play the game. I want to try all the new mods that I see. It inspires others to create new mods and challenges that make gameplay more interesting (SVE and Lance, there’s even a fan-made fishing guide).
Modding Community
If you do want to get into modding there are several things needed to download, but there are plenty of guides and how to’s out there. There have been new games and art creations based on and inspired by Stardew Valley (New Horizon, Lakeburg Legacies, Coral Island, Shane’s Book Club). Leading in here to my next topic, on how I think we should be treating all these separate pieces as part of the Stardew Valley experience.
There is a very interesting article by Fuller, where he discusses the plight of the modding community. He describes how modders of videogames have become disenfranchised by the video game industry when it comes to owning what they create. He lays out several topics leading around the discussion of wasting the potential, diminishing opportunities, and exploitation of unprotected workers. Fuller proposes that an ethical solution exists. To let modders claim ownership of the mods they create but require that their work be labeled as "unofficial." Thus, the industry retains the power of official authenticity while opening partial ownership to any who choose to participate in the collective development of a franchise. Foucault urged people to imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author, a world where it did not matter who was speaking.
When you look at Eric Barone’s twitter feed you can see that he constantly interacting with his fans. I also noticed that very often, he also encourages the use of mods while playing his game. Does the invitation of the “landowner” to the buyers influence the makers in the fandom? I believe it does, considering the flourishing modding community like I have never seen for any other game. Barth argued that “once published, the text is no longer under the control of the author a that the author is irrelevant”. He asserted that the text is “merely a product of other texts and can only be understood through those other texts. Individual authorship of works is to be replaced by intertextuality (Bently).”
I know for myself, I can’t go back to playing only with the vanilla base game; To me, the mods, forums, and fan interactions are an integral part of the game.