What Makes a Game About Mundane Chores Hopelessly Addictive
Stardew Valley is notoriously moreish. Why?
Stardew Valley can easily wipe out an entire day (or five) if you aren’t careful. There aren’t a whole lot of games like that, so I became curious. What makes it special? How on earth does an indie game involving nothing but mundane chores manage to sell 10+ million copies and entertain players for hundreds of hours?
Being bored, as we probably all are right now in the midst of a pandemic, I spent some time figuring out the answers to these questions. In the end, I arrived at three elements that I think make Stardew Valley so effective at hooking in players. There’s a lot that other games could learn from these elements and I hope that, by the end of this post, you’ll come to appreciate just how well-designed this game is.
A Quick Introduction
Stardew Valley gives you a small plot of land to work on, which you promptly de-uglify by removing all the stumps and rocks in your way.
After planting your first seeds, you’ll start on a long journey to build a big farm, earn a lot of money, and marry one of the townspeople by buying them over with gifts. You do so because your dead grandpa is so caught up in your affairs that, even after dying, he’ll come back as a ghost after three years just to judge whether you’ve succeeded in life.
Along the way, you’ll explore Pelican Town and its surroundings, probably experiencing its many festivals. You’ll do a boatload of farming and crafting, a bit of mining and fighting in procedurally-generated caves, and maybe some fishing and foraging if you’re up for it. You might repair a community center, or you might not, and there’s a story to follow and town to save if you care to.
It’s a game that lets you lose yourself in an idyllic world. One where you just do the small but varied tasks you want to do, watching as your farm (or net worth) gradually blooms into something you can be proud of.
Hopefully, that’s enough to paint a bit picture in your head if you haven’t already played it, so let’s get straight to the elements that make the game so successful.
1. Day/Night Cycle
Like all games in the farming simulation genre, Stardew Valley has a day/night cycle that limits the number of tasks a player can do per in-game day. This isn’t just there for aesthetics or realism — I mean it probably was initially, but it has effects beyond that. Whether intended or not, it taps into two major forces that power the human reward system: closure and uncertainty. When combined, these forces hook players and create the “just one more day” feeling games like these are known for.
I’ll start with closure. Key here is the Zeigarnik effect or, more specifically, its lesser-known cousin the Ovsiankina effect — the tendency for people to resume incomplete tasks to satisfy their need for closure. This is what makes the day/night cycle effective. It interrupts the player’s tasks, provoking them to play another day to try and achieve closure. Simple enough.
However, what really makes this work is how Stardew Valley varies its objective completion times. Since they range from mere seconds to several hours of gameplay, there’s almost always an incomplete objective at the end of each day — one that they’ve started or been exposed to earlier. This could be anything from a quest to a tool upgrade or an area the player passed through but has yet to explore. If the player didn’t have an incomplete objective clearly waiting for them the next day, it’d be much easier to justify stopping and you wouldn’t get the “just one more day” effect.
Varied completion times have another advantage. They make it so that at least one of these objectives can usually be finished within the next few days. Even if the player is far away from the next unlock for their farm, they can still usually complete a quest, finish a harvest, upgrade their relationship level with an NPC, or accomplish some other objective within a few cycles. If this weren’t the case, the player would quickly get bored from a lack of progression.
But, even with varied completion times, there’d always be periods where the player doesn’t accomplish much during a day. To fix this issue, the game has an end-of-day report that gives players gold and experience based on the tasks they completed during the day. It also has a series of easily completed routinized tasks, from watering crops to collecting eggs and feeding animals. These provide for some much-needed closure, keeping the player motivated by ensuring that finishing each day feels good. Just like good movies, Stardew Valley carefully balances setups (tasks) and payoffs (closure) to keep the player engaged.
Then there’s the uncertainty part. Every few days also greets the player with a drip-feed of new unlocks, quests, story content, or generally some kind of unexpected change on the map. This drip-feeding not only prevents the players from getting overwhelmed by a long list of tasks, but it also creates uncertainty in the types of objectives and rewards they’ll experience tomorrow. The allure of experiencing or unlocking something new and unexpected encourages the player to play yet another day.
The season-to-season changes, like winter preventing farming, and limited-time calendar events, including a fair with a bunch of mini-games, accomplish just this. They add scarce opportunities and new types of activities that stop the player from getting bored.
2. Interlinked Progression System
The second major element in Stardew Valley is its interlinked progression system. This gives the player a constant stream of objectives and gets the player to interact with a wide variety of activities while making each feel like they meaningfully contribute to long-term progression. Put simply, it creates a treadmill where the player feels like there’s always something to do and that doing it will matter.
Let’s start with what I mean by interlinked, since I’m sure there’s a better term somewhere out there. This just means that there are several types of activity to do and progressing in any one of them will either require or benefit from doing the other activities.
In Stardew Valley’s case, moving further in the mines will be easier with a built-up farm and the food and gold derived from it. So, clearing weeds, chopping trees, and planting seeds will all contribute to mining progression, which then gives them the ingredients they need to craft better tools for farming.
This maximizes the value of content by getting players to interact with a greater variety of it than they otherwise would. They play more and it lets them reset their appreciation for tasks they enjoy but might have burned themselves out on if there was no limit. More importantly, it makes the content they actually want to do a reward in itself. That’s why you’ll often hear players say that they’ll “get grinds out of the way” to get to the good stuff.
Of course, this could get frustrating if the player was constantly forced to do something they didn’t want to. Because of this risk, Stardew Valley gives a lot of choice over the order in which players progress through the different pathways.
It also has a gold economy that lets players trade the fruits of their labor from activities they enjoy to either expedite or skip progression in pathways they don’t enjoy. The player might, for example, earn gold from fishing and farming to buy the ore they need to upgrade their tools. It’s therefore perfectly possible to accomplish some of the long-term objectives by just fishing with minor dips in other activities. As a result, it’s a best-of-both-worlds system that gives players a breadth of content but allows them to skip some of this breadth if they really want to.
The next benefit of an interlinked system is how it creates a stream of objectives, wherein completing one objective creates another, and then finishing that will create a new one and so forth. This means that there’s almost always something to do next without the player having to go out of their way to find it. And, when there always seems to be something to do, it’s hard to find a good time to stop.
A good example of this effect is its tiered crafting system. Finishing tasks during the day will level up the player’s skills, granting them new crafting recipes at certain level thresholds. These recipes create new objectives since the player must now gather the ingredients required to craft the object. Crafting it may then unlock a new tier of production that then creates yet another objective for players, like going out to mine for ore and then smelting the ore into bars. These bars can then be used with other ingredients from other activities to then craft even more things that create even more objectives, and…you get the point.
The same type of stream effect can be seen in farming. Successfully upgrading certain aspects of the farm will lead to new bottlenecks, like a shortage in storage space, land, or water. This will push the player to build silos, clear land, and install sprinklers, as they accumulate more buildings and crops that then create new bottlenecks. The effect even extends to the tiniest things, like how mining has a chance to drop a geode that the player can take to the blacksmith for rewards, or how exploring may yield some resource that the player can take to a character to increase their relationship meter.
Another, related, bonus of an interlinked progression system is something called the goal gradient effect. This is just a behavioral tendency in animals (including humans) to increase effort as they get closer to a goal. It’s why loyalty cards start you off with some points. Being part of the way there already increases the likelihood that you’ll try to get to the next reward tier.
In Stardew Valley, you get this effect because completing any objective will contribute to the completion of another. When the player does a quest to get to level 5 of the mine, they’ll accrue ingredients that can be used for crafting. Since they already have some resources, it’s now much easier for the player to justify starting a grind to craft the next item — they’re already part of the way there, right?
But this isn’t just the case for short-term objectives. Long-term objectives are all designed to either require or benefit from progression along several pathways. Most of them ask the player to reach general thresholds. Such is the case for house upgrades, which require a certain amount of gold that can be earned from any task. A few require progress along specific pathways, like achievements earned from a high mining skill or time-limited item checklists that the player needs to fulfil. The result of both is that every task contributes to at least one long-term objective, if not more. Players get to feel like everything they do matters. That’s a great feeling.
The last advantage of Stardew Valley’s progression system is the sheer number of different pathways. Just to list a few, completing an objective may:
- Unveil more of a character and move the player closer towards marriage
- Repair a deteriorated community center or beautify the player’s farm
- Reveal the answer to a mystery in the story
- Increase the player’s energy level so they can do more tasks per day
- Provide upgrades to combat effectiveness
- Increase inventory space
- Give the player a new tool or building type
- Speed up or automate some task, like watering crops
- Unlock a new part of the map to explore
- Increase the player’s net worth and bring them closer towards a house upgrade
- Contribute to a completable collection of items
- Add a shortcut or new mode of transport that reduces the pain of travel
- Provide new customization options for the player’s house
Such breadth ensures that you’re constantly being rewarded in some way and that there’s something for everyone, from excited explorers, combat lovers, and chill fishers to calculated optimizers and impassioned story-lovers.
A bonus is that it also makes co-op a great time. It lets players specialize roles that suit them, while still contributing to the group’s long-term goals thanks to the interlinked progression system.
3. Iyashikei
Much like Iyashikei (“healing”) anime, Stardew Valley lets the player escape into a tranquil world with little conflict and no obligations other than the simple tasks one chooses to do. A lot of games are an escape, but Stardew Valley is an exceptionally great one and that’s the third element that makes the game so special.
Part of what separates it from the pack is how it mostly forgoes performance measurement, along with the blunt and extrinsic manner with which most other RPGs throw tasks at the player. When combined with the feeling of every task mattering that I talked about before, this creates an intrinsically motivating and pressure-free atmosphere that separates it from other games on the market.
To do this, Stardew Valley mostly uses little nudges rather than overt prompts to direct the player towards new objectives. In fact, the game is a masterclass in creating and maintaining intrinsic motivation for tasks. I’ve already mentioned some of ways that objectives are automatically created by the progression system, but I’ll list some more out because it really is amazing how well it does this:
- Subtly showing the player an eye-sore of a field and giving them the tools to beautify it
- Just giving the player a recipe with a list of ingredients, rather than a quest that explicitly asks them to craft something
- Having a daily gift limit that encourages the player to take full advantage of it
- Adding calendar events like birthdays that grant extra rewards for some types of task, such that players are encouraged to do them
- Casually introducing various activities, like revealing a fishing sport or a mysterious cave to explore, and then just letting the player’s curiosity take the wheel
This is occasionally taken a bit too far though. Such is the case at the start of the game, where players that are accustomed to more extrinsic guidance can struggle with forming their own goals, especially since the game starts out slow and the player doesn’t accomplish much in the first few days. That being said, it does a fine job guiding the player for the most part.
Now, of course, genius ways of providing tasks wouldn’t matter if they didn’t feel satisfying to complete. As a result, the game also has some fantastic audio-visual feedback on player actions. The most well-known example is the watering can, which has an incredibly satisfying sound effect.
Just like any other form of feedback, what makes the effect satisfying is that it stands out from the rest of the soundscape, matches the player’s expectations of what a watering can sounds like, and clearly communicates the successful initiation and completion of the action — in this case with a crisp and exaggerated increase and decrease in audible flow rate.
The same three criteria are met by all oft-heard sounds, from the rustle of harvesting a crop to the plop of a fishing float hitting the water. Without satisfying audio-visual feedback, the mundane and constantly repeated tasks that underpin gameplay would quickly get irritating.
Then there’s visual progression. The vibrant art style lends itself to high contrasts between, say, the leaves of crops and the soil they occupy or the fruits they bear. Buildings and crops also have a unique sprite for every stage of growth. These two factors make progress tangible via the big visual difference between each stage of progress, which increases the satisfaction of completing tasks. In other words, it feels much more like you’re making progress when you can easily tell how much the crops have grown and how much better your farm looks.
Making progress so visible comes with another benefit. It helps create pressures for reciprocal contribution in cooperative play. If one player can see how much progress the other has made, they’re much more likely to put in more effort themselves. If they put in more effort, they’ll generally increase the game’s overall entertainment value for the group.
Lastly, Stardew Valley wouldn’t be the same without its atmosphere. Chirping crickets, crashing waves, gently falling snow, swaying trees, crunchy footsteps, and a calming soundtrack are all cost-effective ways to create atmosphere.
They trigger positive emotions, immerse the player into a living world, and add audio-visual variation that prevents fatigue and encourages exploration and traversal. There are few games that do atmosphere better than Stardew Valley.
Conclusion
If a game about mundane tasks can sustain attention for hundreds of hours, it probably has a great progression system. That’s the case for Stardew Valley. There’s a lot we can learn from it, but I think there are three core elements that are most important.
The first is the day/night cycle. It interrupts the player’s tasks, creating a burning desire to play the next day to achieve closure. This desire is boosted by a drip-feed on new and unexpected changes, like unlocks and limited-time quests and events. Even if you haven’t played Stardew Valley, you’re probably familiar with this desire given that turns in 4X games and cliff-hangers in TV shows work the exact same way.
The second is an interlinked progression system that both encourages the player to go through a breadth of different activities and automatically creates new objectives after old ones are completed. Crucially, progress spills over between these objectives, which makes initiating the next objective easier and hooks the player into a treadmill of tasks.
The game also has an in-game gold economy that lets players speed up or skip unwanted grinds by earning money from the activities they do like. Additionally, it makes sure that every task will contribute to at least one long-term objective. The net result of all of these factors is that the player feels like there’s always something to do and that everything they do matters. You’ll find the same factors behind the popularity of Old School Runescape.
The third and final factor is how the game makes itself a uniquely attractive escape. For one, it doesn’t throw the player a list of quests and objective markers like most other games. Instead, it stealthily nudges players towards objectives and gives them a lot of control over what they want to do. It also has some top-notch audio-visuals, which immerse the player and make task completion highly satisfying. These coalesce to make a satisfying and pressure-free game that stands out in a market saturated by high-octane action.
If I were to sum it up in one sentence: Stardew Valley hooks players because it masterfully exploits the adaptations that have for millennia compelled humans to complete tasks in the real world. That’s what a good progression system does. This game just also happens to be about doing the same real-world tasks.
Now that I’ve answered my question, here’s one for you to ponder: have you ever commented on a post because it had a question at the end?
