![]() ![]() Armed with hand-me-down tools and a few coins, you set out to begin your new life!Ĭan you learn to live off the land and turn these overgrown fields into a thriving home? It won’t be easy. You're moving to the Valley…You've inherited your grandfather's old farm plot in Stardew Valley. The success of the game in eliciting on-line debates, and the requirement for active performance and decision-making, demonstrates the specific potential of computer games as mediums for influencing and intervening in ongoing reworking of farming imaginaries, and enabling more critically engagement of the ‘desk chair countryside’ in important global debates. However, Stardew Valley gameplay implicitly reinforces the ideal that low input farming is the way that agriculture should be practiced. I argue that embedding issues of big-box development in gameplay enrols players in active reflection and debate on desirable responses, whereas the emphasis on reproducing classical agrarian tropes risks desensitizing game players to contemporary agrarian social and environmental justice issues. Conflict is centred on urban-based big business, whereas the farm is represented as a ‘bolt-hole’ or sanctuary from urban life. More recent discourses of critical agrarianism are noticeably absent, particularly in relation to environmental protection. The farming narrative demonstrates the hallmarks of classical American agrarianism: farming as the basic profession on which other occupations depend, the virtue of hard work, the ‘natural’ and moral nature of agricultural life, and the economic independence of the farmer. ![]() Player are given a choice to invest in the Community Center or to support ‘JojaMart’, a ‘big-box’ development. Stardew is based on a scenario whereby players leave a urban desk job to revitalize the family farm. ![]() ![]() In this paper, I critique the narratives and images of farming life expressed in the popular computer game ‘Stardew Valley’. Farming computer games enable the ‘desk chair countryside’-millions of people actively engaged in performing farming and rural activities on-line-to co-produce their desired representations of rural life, in line with the parameters set by game creators. ![]()
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