Heidegger taught me how to play Stardew Valley
Discomfort in cozy farming games
I love all manner of cozy farming games, from the genre defining Stardew Valley to lesser-known entries, like the rough around the edges but surprisingly fun Pumpkin Days. I follow cozy game content creators. I keep on top of the endless lists of “best upcoming cozy games” (that never seem to get released). I’m invested in and have every intention of continuing with the genre, despite my misgivings.
My main issue with these games, which I don’t experience with other types of games, is the intense but fleeting whirlwind romance I have with each, at least the ones that manage to get their nails planted deep in my flesh. I become invested in beautifying my farm, amassing wealth through fishing mini-games (forget the stock market), and mustering every last bit of courage to unlock the deepest levels of the mine. Then, without fail, the romance is suddenly over, and it tends to happen right when I’m hitting my stride. I’m on a first name basis with everyone in town, from the mayor to the cranky old drifter. I’m becoming a fictional somebody in this fictional little town when, without warning, my interest in playing the game vanishes, absolutely.
Sometimes the break-up happens after I’ve completed a goal I had set myself. It isn’t even a goal so lofty as completing the game, but something dumb like upgrading my shovel — perhaps it turns out that shoveling two squares at a time instead of just one just isn’t as satisfying as it sounded when I was grinding for the materials to make it. Other times, there’s no specific catalyst that causes me to lose interest. I’m just over it. What’s worse, all the time I spent with it immediately seems like a waste, and, in real life, I think I could have done anything, and it would have been a better use of time. So many crushed pixel rocks and felled pixel trees for nothing. So much diligence about keeping pixel carrots watered that I won’t even bother to throw in the pixel shipping bin. I’m hit with this deep existential regret, at least until I go onto Steam to see what else is on my wishlist.
Again, I’m not like this with other genres of video games or movies and books. If I get tired of them, if they no longer bring me joy, I move on, and that’s it. So thinking about why these dramatic dead ends would be so much more soul crushing in farming sims, I landed on Martin Heidegger, the phenomenologist philosopher.
Granted, I have spent a lot more time playing Stardew Valley than I have spent reading Heidegger, but basically Heidegger said that as “beings-in-the-world,” we get caught up in our everyday routines; watering crops, picking up berries until our fingers are red, stabbing at green slimes. Because of this, distracted by mundane chores, we stop asking the big existential questions: What is the meaning of all this? Do I really care about farming? Who are all these people buying the bugs I catch? And, finally, why doesn’t my backpack reek of fish?
Essentially, we rarely self-reflect, but there are moments in our lives that force us to look into the abyss. Moments that take us out of the experience, like an underwhelming shovel upgrade or the realization that no one is ever going to visit the museum that we have spent hours filling with all the junk we could fit in our backpacks. Moments of “uncanniness” as Heidegger puts it, can prompt us to start asking questions about our place in the world, and sometimes, we don’t like the answers. More than games in other genres, the parallels to real life might be a little too close, where your character’s existence revolves around the completion of mundane tasks to make incremental improvements to their world and their place in it. It requires the player to maintain a belief in the merit of their efforts, and it doesn’t take much to deflate this belief…and the player’s motivation.
For me, it is easy to get sucked into the cozy nooks that these games create, the cute sound effects of a bunch of logs bursting from a tree or the ding, ding, ding of my mining axe hitting a shiny rock full of treasure. It is just that, without exception, at some point in my cozy journey, something uncanny slaps me in the face. It forces me back to the city I came from just as disheveled and forlorn as the farm I inherited, before I spent way too much time lovingly building it back up to its former glory.
