Since I was a kid, I’ve been an anxious person, and I’ve loved farming life sim games like Stardew Valley. Those two facts are intertwined.
My obsession with the genre started with Harvest Moon on the SNES, a game I was so deeply embarrassed to be playing that I’d regularly hide it from sight. If someone walked in while I was playing, I’d turn the screen off, like my relationship with Ellen (the original best farming sim waifu) was something illicit. It was roughly the same anxiety-impelled motion that ensued when I heard a floorboard creak while watching half-scrambled ads on late night TV in the early ’00s.
The reason I was embarrassed to play Harvest Moon was pretty simple: It wasn’t considered a game for boys. It didn’t have shooting, aliens, or one-liners. Instead, you grew vegetables and befriended villagers. You didn’t blow cows up with a rocket launcher; you brushed them and milked them. You romanced marriage candidates, got married, and had a family.
That was the kind of game that, in the ’90s, got you called a very specific slur by other kids and siblings. You know the one. It starts with “f,” and ends with having to punch another boy in the stomach, because that’s what toxic masculinity necessitates you do to remain one of the boys, at least it did in the ’90s.
While all that anxiety about losing community dictated my school life, I found a lot of peace in Harvest Moon, but it wasn’t until I played Stardew Valley that I understood exactly why.
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The thing that underlies my anxiety is this: I don’t know what’s going to happen next. I rehearse conversations in my head, planning for every possibility except things going well. It’s a pleasant surprise when someone doesn’t scream at me when trying to make a restaurant reservation. I live under a constant fear that I’m going to, or am doing, something wrong, and that no one is telling me or helping me. I worry that the rug is about to get pulled out from me and that the world will morph into something grotesque faster than I can snap my fingers. Even now, as I write this, I’m worried about your reaction to these words. Depending on when you’re reading this and how online you are, you may or may not know why I’m especially worried.
I’m generally pretty wrong. When I wrote about how what happened to Earth in Starfield broke my heart, I expected an awful reaction. Like always, there were jerks, but for the most part, people were kind. At one point, I looked at the comments on the video version that went up on the Stratos YouTube channel and I’ve never seen more kind, supportive people. For the first time in two decades on the internet, a comments section made me feel good. I wish I could say they always made me feel good, but that’s a different problem.
Stardew Valley and other farming sims help with that anxiety, because when I play those games, I wake up with the same overarching goal every day: Do the best that I can.
There’s certainly an anxiety associated with min/maxing and being able to accomplish all I want to with a ticking clock, but the next morning, I get a chance to start again. And every day, I’m able to accomplish something. My character doesn’t get bogged down by anxiety or despair. They never sit with their head down on their desk wondering what the hell they’re supposed to do next. They water their crops. They get knocked out by those god damn Serpent enemies. They make friends. They keep moving forward and winning little victories.
In farming sims, the world generally doesn’t really change. Seasons pass, but children remain children, and the elderly remain elderly. Everyone wants to see you succeed, and they’re there to support you. You’re there to support them right back. You do missions for them. You fix up their community center. It isn’t complicated. It’s a community that will, provided you’re not a complete jerk, always treat you as having done your best. It’s stable, and no one ever disappears. That’s something beautiful.
I guess you could say a reason I love Stardew Valley is that it’s escapist (please, wince now). It gives me a chance to escape from my anxiety for a time, and to exist in an ideal world where I’m always able to win little victories and keep moving forward, regardless of what else happens.
I think this weekend I’m going to play some Stardew Valley.
