a midwife is normal about stardew valley
emily o'dell on the epic highs and lows of digital farming
Emily O’Dell is a midwife by trade and a player of farming simulators, also by trade. Today she is feeling normal about Stardew Valley, a video game where you log on and lock in. Besides all the normal chores that come with running an agricultural enterprise, Stardew also lets you start a platonic life partnership with a sewer creature, harvest dinosaur eggs, and farm so good that Jeff Bezos goes broke. Punch enough hours and it’s easy to get sucked into normalcy, Emily says — you might even start dreaming in pixels. Literally.
This interview has been edited for clarity, coherence, and vibes.
JADIE: What are you feeling normal about, and how did you first encounter it?
EMILY: I’m feeling so normal about Stardew Valley, to the tune of over 3,000 hours played in a lifetime, just of this singular video game. Which, yes, is over half a year of my real life, if I played 24 hours a day for half a year. And that should horrify me, but it doesn’t. It simply doesn’t.
I started playing in college, but the actual origin goes back to when I was eight or nine and I played this Game Boy game called Harvest Moon, which was the proto-Stardew Valley. It was one of the original farming simulation games, and it’s very iconic in the genre and established a lot of its conventions. I was obsessed with this game, although it’s objectively quite boring — there’s not a whole lot you can do besides, like, feed your chickens, feed your horse. Brush that horsie real good. And it has some of the other conventions of the genre, like relationships with other characters; you can talk to people in town and romance them.
It was also one of my first experiences with comphet, because in the version I played, you could only be a woman and you could only date men. So I literally picked the bachelor who lived in the next farm over from my farm, just so that it was as easy as possible to make him fall in love with me. Just to get it over with — you know, check off that achievement in the game.
NICOLE: And you were little, so this was pre-lesbianism.
EMILY: For sure. I don’t even know what I would’ve done if it had been an option to date homosexually.
One of the main things that drew me into the game was that there were these little glimmers of weird supernatural things randomly going on in this otherwise very beige farming simulator. I remember if you grew a bunch of cucumbers and threw them into a specific lake, you could summon this cucumber demon named Kappa — stuff like that.
So the developer of Stardew Valley, Concerned Ape, is the Tame Impala of developers in that he’s just one guy, and it’s fucking incredible to me that it’s just one guy. But he also grew up playing Harvest Moon and other farming sims and was like, I want to make one, but good. I started playing Stardew Valley pretty close to when it came out, but it already had a huge community around it.
NICOLE: It’s known as a pretty chill game, right?
EMILY: Largely yes, it is a very calm game, and it’s very escapist. I never did this, but it’s a known phenomenon that new players will get so into the game at first that they start dreaming about it, because it just sucks you in.
But I think that every kind of gamer can find something in it, because you can also go to the mines, and the mines are, like, infected with monsters, and all of a sudden it’s a combat game and you’re doing both combat and mining.
JADIE: So if you’re into doing really intense, forced labor, you can yearn for the mines.
EMILY: No, exactly. You can go get fucked up in the mines, or you can, like, befriend an alcoholic and save them from a suicide attempt. There are at least 30 or 40 characters, and they all have a backstory. There’s soldiers returning from war, and housewives, and these little gremlin guys who live in the sewer. There’s a dwarf, so you can learn Dwarvish and go speak to him. Or you can go fishing. Or you can just plant some little crops. You can do whatever.
JADIE: Are you into other games in this genre?
EMILY: I was big into Animal Crossing as a kid, although I wasn’t so into the new one that came out during COVID, because it leans very heavily on the decorating and home design aspect of these games and not so much on characters and world-building, which are really what I was into.
Plus, it was big on people visiting each other’s islands, and I just don’t care about that. You can technically play co-op in Stardew Valley, which is when you have the same farm and you’re working on it together. Not me, though! Not me. This is my me-time. I don’t want anyone else on my farm fucking it up.
Like I said, romance is also a big aspect of the game. Over all my saves, I think I’ve married every single female NPC. I also gay-married one of the male NPCs who has a great gay story arc, and I straight-married one of them. But my wifey is Haley, which for any Stardew Valley heads reading this will be a very controversial statement. You either love her or you hate her, and if you hate her, you just don’t know her like I do. I’ve had 40 or 50 different saves of this game, and I marry Haley almost every time.
You can also be platonic roommates with the guy who lives in the sewers. His name is Krobus.
NICOLE: How involved is the romance? Are you selecting from dialogue trees?
EMILY: Yeah, it’s dialogue trees, and gifts are the main thing you do to win people’s affection. There’s a mechanism built in to keep you from love bombing people; you can only give a set number of gifts every week to force you to develop your relationships. And then every time you get to a new level of friendship, you get a special cutscene event where you can further your relationship with that person. If you give them a bouquet, you become boyfriend-girlfriend.
NICOLE: Are there parameters to the game? You said there were dwarves, so could, I don’t know, dinosaurs show up?
EMILY: Oh, very much so. You do very much get dinosaur eggs, and catch them, and farm dinosaurs.
NICOLE: That was the most random hypothetical I could think of, but okay, good to know.
EMILY: Yeah, no, that’s just part of the game.
JADIE: Beyond the supernatural, it sounds like the game involves a lot of chores. What appeals to you about that?
EMILY: It’s all the dopamine you get from doing chores and none of the work of doing them. A big theme of Stardew is anti-capitalism, and seeing the fruits of your labor. You very much own the means of production. The whole inciting incident of the game is that your grandpa dies and leaves you this farm, and you’ve been working for Joja Corporation, which is a stand-in for whatever evil megacorporation you want. And so you quit your job and you move to this farm that your grandpa gave you, and then you spend the whole first segment of the game dismantling Joja.
It’s very satisfying to be able to see your farm come together and grow, and it heals the community, you know? It’s nice. That’s how the world should work.
NICOLE: So you dismantle the corporation through really good farming?
EMILY: Yeah, you farm so good that Walmart explodes. It’s awesome.
NICOLE: I’m kind of obsessed with labor being the driving force of the story, which I guess is true of most cozy games on a meta level, whether it’s acknowledged or not. An anti-capitalist narrative is so perfect for the genre.
EMILY: Yeah. The gameplay loop is so satisfying, in that you’re constantly reinvesting the funds that you’re earning into the things you’re crafting and putting back into your farm to improve it and improve it. You’re not wasting anything. It’s not materialist. You’re self-sufficient and sustainable.
Some people definitely play it on mega-capitalist-mode, though. There’s a route where you can choose to support the evil corporation instead of the small town, which is called a Joja run. And in my 3,000 hours, I have never done a Joja run because that is simply not the fun way to play, and I’m not interested. But you can do that — you can deforest the entire town and use it to build a wine empire if that’s how you want to play the game. You can, and I will judge you for it!
JADIE: It does feel like you shouldn’t be allowed to play that way.
EMILY: People love to say there’s no wrong way to play the game. False! There absolutely are wrong ways to play the game.
JADIE: You said earlier that you’ve had a bunch of saves of the game — what makes you start a new one?
EMILY: There pretty much is a natural end to progression at some point. The peak you can achieve in the game is called “perfection,” which means 100%-ing every possible category. You get to a certain point where you can unlock a perfection tracker, and it tells you all the things you need to do to achieve perfection, and if you do them, you get this extra-special secret cutscene and other stuff. I’ve only ever done that once because it was a horrific grind, and a lot of parts of it were not that fun.
But even if I’m not striving for perfection, there comes a time where I’m like, Well, I’ve pretty much maxed out all my friendships and the farm is the best that it can be. And at that point I’m ready to be back in the weeds and grind up from the beginning.
NICOLE: It’s very Buddhist.
EMILY: Actually, there is an in-game religion that people follow.
NICOLE: I feel like farming is a religion unto itself in this context, though.
JADIE: That’s what I was thinking, too — like, that’s the practice of sanctity and community.
EMILY: And commitment to the land! Also Grandpa’s ghost comes back at one point, so ghosts are real in the Stardew canon.
JADIE: Are you still playing these days?
EMILY: [Laughs] I just logged off about five minutes before this call. Not to prep or anything; that’s just what I do with my time.
NICOLE: I love that. I feel like there have been so many times when I’m like, Wow, I’ve done nothing with my day. But if I were to tend to my farm…
JADIE: Aww. Me and my two unemployed homies in the chat. [Laughs]
EMILY: There’s no better unemployment game. Employment simulator!
JADIE: If someone were to get normal about Stardew Valley — maybe even someone on this call — where should they start? Just download it?
EMILY: Yeah, just jump the fuck in. I think it sets up new players well in terms of structure; in the beginning you get a series of quests that are very accessible.
JADIE: And then you start to dream about it…
EMILY: And then you start to dream about it, so you probably also unlock new Eldritch secrets of Stardew Valley that way.
JADIE: Is there fanwork around the game?
EMILY: Oh, absolutely. There’s fanfiction, and there are mods. The actual game isn’t sexual — at most, you can kiss your spouse with Implications. So there are mods that can make it a little spicier if that’s what you’re into. Also, there are mods to romance any single character in the game, including the non-romanceable ones.
NICOLE: Including the gremlin guy in the sewer?
EMILY: Well, Krobus is more of a creature. There’s a mod where you can have kids with him, but I think it’s still platonic.
In the game, if you’re in a gay relationship, you adopt, and if you’re in a straight relationship, you get pregnant or your spouse gets pregnant.
NICOLE: I love that there are dinosaurs in this universe, but MPreg does not exist.
EMILY: It does not exist, although there’s probably a mod for that. There is an implication that one of the townspeople is the illegitimate child of the wizard and another townsperson, but that’s for you to discover.
It’s funny that I’ve never really gotten into The Sims, because I do feel like the lore of Stardew is Sims-adjacent.
NICOLE: But The Sims is an inherently capitalist game, not only because of the way you’re upsold expansion packs but also because within the game, you’re like, I want to grind so I can build a mansion.
JADIE: And it’s about bypassing. The most famous cheat code is “motherlode,” where you just give yourself money.
NICOLE: Plus the actual labor is not fun. For the most part you just send your Sim to work offscreen like, Good luck, bud.
EMILY: Yeah, and in Stardew, you can’t just send Farmer to the mines to go get iridium ore. You have to be in the mines. You are putting in the labor. It’s very pro-worker!
JADIE: Are you better or worse for knowing about Stardew Valley, and is the world better or worse for Stardew Valley existing?
EMILY: Oh, the world is absolutely a better place for Stardew Valley. Like, no doubt. It simply is. There have been controversies we don’t have to get into, but every community has its weird sides.
Now, am I better or worse off? I want to say I’m better off, but what else could I have done with those 3,000 hours? That is something that I do have to ponder.
NICOLE: Although if you get into a flow state from it — how different is it from doing yoga, you know what I mean?
JADIE: Not that different at all, is my takeaway.
EMILY: [Laughs] Okay, great. Never mind; I’m doing yoga.
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