Is Stardew Valley Trying to Turn Us into Communists?

One could applaud these flirtations with increased realism as a boon to the sub-genre—an attempt to move towards an approach with a bit more teeth. And when it comes to the game’s evil Joja Corporation, ConcernedApe certainly isn’t afraid to bare those teeth, either. Make no mistake: Stardew Valley may traffic in pixelated nostalgia, but it wears its progressive heart on its sleeve, striking out against corporatism at every turn. Your character works for Joja at the beginning of the game, a role that the game depicts as soul-destroying in its tedium. The player then opens a long-cherished letter, which reveals that their dead grandfather has bequeathed them his old farm as a safeguard against the corruption of the hum-drum office life.

Once in Pelican Town, the player finds that Joja has opened its own store that undercuts the local mom-and-pop, complete with unhappy employees and a duplicitous manager, Morris. If the player chooses to buy a membership card from “Joja-Mart,” the community center where the magical sprites live will be converted into a warehouse, and the opportunity to chase the company out of town goes with it. The rewards that the sprites would offer are subsumed into Joja-Mart’s normal wares. However, instead of purchasing them with diverse bundles of seasonal goods, the player simply buys them outright for massive amounts of cash. All incentive to experiment thus evaporates; the player’s winning strategy amounts to little more than growing the maximum amount of the most profitable cash crop season in and season out. The takeaway isn’t exactly subtle: pure capitalism leads to monopolies that discourage innovation.

When held against the rote simplicity of the core play patterns, these statements seem a bit incongruous. Despite its simulation label, the farming itself is basically Harvest Moon Plus Plus: a game where you hug your cow to get it to produce better milk, where you ply your way to marriage and friendship by giving the locals all sorts of ill-gotten goods. There’s fertile ground for allegory here, but it becomes hard to take seriously when the game beats you over the head with it so relentlessly. Morris in particular is the stuff of anticapitalist parody, a superhumanly diligent employee who possesses no personality outside of his commitment to Joja.

And regardless of the player’s choice to purchase the membership, the farming still devolves into a never-ending quest for the most efficient layout—sprinklers and cranberries as far as the eye can see, all producing a fountain of money that only sees use at the genre-standard evaluation at the end of the game. As the credits roll, one gets the sense that ConcernedApe’s devotion to its inspirations vastly outpaced its desire to render commentary on the systems it has created.

But what’s most disarming about all this is that Stardew itself feels like a product of capitalist accretion. It’s a handful of proven if shopworn mechanics refined into a supremely approachable version of an old favorite—in other words, a product through-and-through. Worse still, the Cinderella story that shadows the game’s incredible success feeds all the old myths: a lone mega-talent giving the people exactly what they want for nothing but the sweat of his brow, working a menial job to help pay the rent, waiting until everything is just so before deigning to ask money for it. As we try to get a sense of what Stardew’s great success means in an increasingly fraught industry, it seems that it isn’t enough for the basement developers of the world to devote years of their lives to the games we slaver over—no, they must also prostrate themselves before the mass of consumers, in the snow, naked before us all. Stardew puts in a sincere effort, but it can only push against the tide so hard. And that’s what it gets right; in a world like this, perhaps we do need magical sprites to help us undo the damage, little by little. At least they come cheap.

Steven T. Wright is a long-suffering Southerner now displaced into a strange land of milk and beer. He wanted to name his novel after a city in Final Fantasy, but his friends talked him out of it. He’s written for The Atlantic, Vice and more, and can be found on Twitter @Pseudagonist.