![]() One afternoon I called Parker over to show her how much you can make on a good haul of melons and corn. The chests in my house were overflowing with gold ore and rubies from the mine. In winter nothing grows, so I ground my way through the mines, clearing them level by level, while Parker redecorated her house and made friends with mopey Abigail with the purple hair and a wizard who lived in the forest. ![]() I asked her how she knew all this and she told me, "I talk to them." How Penny teaches them at the museum because there's no school in Pelican Town and how Alex, the jock, is a lot sadder than he seems because his father was an abusive drunk and his mom died, and now he lives with his grandparents but doesn't like to talk about it. So instead, she followed behind the children, Jas and Vincent, and told me how Jas's parents were both dead. You walk away, get on a bus and travel to the farm that your grandpa left to you years ago in Stardew Valley. The core of Stardew Valley's story is simple: You are an office drone, just tappy-tapping away at your computer day after day, year after year until, finally, it all becomes too much. I made a farm of my own - Butcher Holler - and the two of us played side-by-side for two in-game years. "What are you doing?"Īnd she looked up at me and said, "Just playing. "Parker," I said to her, frustration putting an edge on my words. Go off onto the paths that run between her Kawaii Farm and Pelican Town a couple screens away to pick flowers, talk to people or poke through their trash cans. She would water two or three plants, then run off to chase her dog, come back, water a little more, go look at butterflies or just leave. ![]() I would watch from the couch as she wandered aimlessly around her small, cluttered house or doodled around her asymmetrical mess of a farm - her movements a kind of digital Brownian motion born of a hundred distractions. It exists like an indie re-incarnation of Harvest Moon, the game which introduced the world to farming sims in the 1990's, and there's an entire generation of gamers who love it unreservedly just for that - for being a polished new version of something they loved like crazy-go-nuts back in the day - but on the surface, it's a game that doesn't seem to have a lot going on.Īll Tech Considered Reading The Game: The Flame In The Flood ![]() You fish sometimes, talk to the people who live in town, deal with the magical apple monsters who have taken over the town's community center and demand tribute in the form of a hundred small quests. The game is essentially a farming simulator - you grow crops and sell them, tend animals and make cheese from their milk or mayonnaise from their eggs. She loves videogames the way I love videogames, but loves none of the videogames I love - not the shooty ones or the dark ones or the violent ones. She's 13, smart, beautiful, furious, funny, clumsy as a newborn giraffe. It was my daughter Parker who picked up Stardew Valley first. So we're running an occasional series, Reading The Game, in which we take a look at some of these games from a literary perspective. Life in 16 bits - complete with chickens and monsters - in Stardew Valley.įor years now, some of the best, wildest, most moving or revealing stories we've been telling ourselves have come not from books, movies or TV, but from video games.
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