Slowness and Stardew
“We all have different gifts, so we all have different ways of saying to the world who we are.” — Fred Rogers
Whenever we think about interactive media, there are often two types of play styles that come to mind: Doing everything as fast as possible to move on to the next challenge, or exploring every area to take in as much of an experience as possible.
Within this busy world of endless rushing, we often forget the power of slowing down.
In such a world, we have almost completely forgotten this practice in many forms of digital media, and the word “slow” itself. How do we even create and maintain slowness in video games?
Fred Rogers to the rescue.
The Life of a Legend
Born in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, in 1928, Fred Rogers spent most of his career being the light in many of our parents’ childhoods, sending important educational messages through his show, Mister Rogers Neighborhood. Going to college as a minister, he later changed his career path when he found out about television, and disliked it, because it was only used as a value of entertainment, when he thought it should enrich the lives of children as an educational platform. He was fearless, and also an expert, and perhaps a pioneer, in the ingredient of slowness in digital media.
Slowing Down With Curiosity
Fred’s work paved an entirely new path in the digital media industry, using the powerful tool of television to build children’s curiosity at a young age. If he were alive right now, he would probably despise television today, since children are growing up watching whatever their parents put on rather than shows geared towards them. In addition, there are not nearly as many shows anymore that aim to give children an individualized educational experience like Fred’s did. Despite this, I know for a fact he would love iPads, since there are many apps that are geared towards children, giving them experiences that enhance their curiosity like never before.
Children aren’t the only ones that need to learn how to slow down and become curious. Adolescents and adults, too, need to maintain this skill. But, how? With so many video games on the market with the same linear start-to-finish execution, how could there be something that lets us slow down and actually do things at our own pace?
To Fred, the idea of making goodness attractive is to let kids slowly build up their curiosity over time, by giving them the scaffolding to become an expert in a specific topic. He did this by designating an entire week of his show on certain topics, such as death, divorce, and friendships. As Author Maxwell King puts it, “Fred helped us understand that there is no normal life free from pain, and we have to learn from that pain.” This way, kids can learn on their own time how to cope with hardships and learn more about what they enjoy doing, which drives them to do it.
It seems in this fast-paced world, there is a game that Fred would reinforce in his teachings, after all. In comes Stardew Valley, a game created by one person, Eric Barone.
A Gamer’s Tale
I’m going to be completely transparent here: Being someone with ADHD, I often move very quickly from one thing to the other. I also tend to love action games, since they’re more stimulating to me on an audio, visual, and design level. Any video game like Animal Crossing or Harvest Moon, where you take things slow and relax, just never did it for me. So when I was told to purchase Stardew Valley, I was skeptical, having lost interest to other games like it before.
Three years and 650+ hours later, I can safely say that Stardew Valley is my favorite game of all time. It puts me in a state of flow unlike any other game I’ve played before.
Goodness in the Valley
Stardew Valley is an excellent example of goodness that is attractive on the basis of slowness, because of how the game is designed. When you start, you learn what types of things NPC like, dislike, and what type of farmer you want to be through skills, such as getting more money for artisan goods and crops. There are also Bundles that can be done within the game to unlock new areas and items, such as Minecarts and Calico Desert.
However, the real crown jewel that reinforces slowness, is how much time you have during the day, and the seasonal and yearly cycle of events. There are certain items that are only available on certain days in certain times, seasons, and weather. For example, the player can only grow Pumpkins in the Fall, and catch Shad at night during rainy weather. There are so many events, interactions, and quests that you can do, and because of the ample amount of time the games gives, it never feels too overwhelming. In fact, every NPC villager within the game has a set schedule on certain days, reinforcing the action of slowly getting to know them over a long period of time. This is highly accurate in real-life, too, since moving to new places forces us to start over, learn more about people, and find ourselves once again.
The idea of slowness in media, and the real world, highly reflects Rogers’ influence on all of us to this day. We simply cannot push this aside, as slowness is one of the most important aspects of anyone’s development. Take a look around yourself, absorb all the knowledge and information you can, and then you too, can begin to truly appreciate the quality of things around yourself.
