A Social Sandbox Critical Play of Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life
Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life is a game created by Natsume for Game Cube and is designed for all audiences of all ages. In it, players build their own farm, growing their own plants and raising animals. I played this game frequently with my brother when I was young, and it remains a fond memory of my childhood pasttimes.
Though Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life is usually considered a single-player, I actually consider it to be a social one. With a memory card, this game allowed for two lives to be saved at once. This meant that my brother and I would frequently compete against one another to grow more crops or get a spouse in the game faster than the other. There was also a sharp wariness that one of us might accidentally (or intentionally) play the other’s file.
This game enables players to not only build a farm, but build relationships with others (NPCs) in your village who in turn give you special gifts or recipes. This affects the fun of the game by adding a dimension of surprise and long-term interest in playing, since it takes a while to give gifts to and befriend a villager. It adds an interesting NPC-social element as well, since you can show off your crops or other items to your fellow villagers and unlock special events with them as you grow closer to them.
You can also court a spouse in the game by continually visiting them and giving them gifts, and over time you can raise a son. Getting a spouse and raising a child takes years in the game, however, which translates to pretty significant gameplay time (each minute in the game takes one second in real life). There are also special events and contests that occur at a certain place at a certain time of the year with no advance notice, and without cheating online to figure out when those are, you need to play for a while to come across these events.
Your character and all the villagers also get old over time, and the game apparently ends when your character dies after reaching a very old age. Few players seem to reach this point, however, with this Youtuber explaining that it took two years of constant play to reach this stage even though he took as many shortcuts as he could (his play required a whopping 165 videos to document the experience). After spending so much time forging relationships and building their lives on their farm, players can get very invested in the game.
To that end, I would say that Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life feels more like a toy (albeit a peaceful, relaxing one) than a game. There aren’t concrete goals that players must accomplish, since you can play the game almost indefinitely without growing a single crop if you wish. Players can choose to make the most cost-efficient farm, chase after love, dig for treasure, hunt for rare fish, enjoy getting to know the other villagers, or simply walk around a peaceful landscape to pass time.
In thinking about the formal game elements that do exist in the game though, here’s a diagram of the formal elements I identified.
I think the procedure and variance in outcome of this game create the main fun in this game. Time passes quite slow, and this creates a relaxed but realistic atmosphere where players can do whatever they choose to do with their time. The music and scenery also contributes to this relaxed feel.
Last winter, my brother and I pulled out our dusty GameCube from storage. We hadn’t touched it since middle school, and we’re both in our 20s now. As we put in our old memory card and turned on Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life, a flood of memories came back as we fought again for the controller to experience our farms again. We argued over whose character was best positioned to unlock the events neither of us had gotten before (and should thus be the one playing) and laughed at how some things never change.
In that sense, I think Harvest Moon is a wonderfully social sandbox.
