Stardew Valley at 10: The anti-capitalist game that tackles burnout and inspires queer art | games

WHen farming sim Stardew Valley debuted in 2016, and was considered by most of us to be a modest indie success, offering charm, wit, and a beautiful little world. Ten years later, this little indie game has sold nearly 50 million copies. If you haven’t played it yourself, you’ve probably seen someone playing it on the train (or, in the case of one of my musical theater colleagues, in the dressing room between scenes). As we discussed on the Tech Weekly podcast shortly after its release, this soothing game about caring for crops, animals, and relationships with neighbors revitalized the entire farming/life simulation genre. To this day, I still receive press releases promising that some upcoming cozy game or other is the next Stardew Valley.

While developer Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone now has a small team to help with regular updates, the original game — his first — was all his own work, from the distinctive pixel art and animation to the soundtrack, which has since toured the world in concert. Unable to get a job after college, he started his own project inspired by the Harvest Moon series (now called Story of Seasons). One notable addition was the inclusion of queer romance options. The ability to pursue a romantic relationship with other townspeople is a key part of the game’s popularity – as evidenced by the thousands who followed a video of Barone revealing the identity of two new marriage candidates – and the fact that all potential spouses are available to the player character regardless of gender, has helped the game gain a dedicated gay fanbase.

“In a game where you’re playing an idyllic life, you should be able to marry the person you want,” says kcspace, a member of the thriving Stardew Valley modding community, which is creating new features and stories for the PC version of the game and distributing them online. For its modifications, it took inspiration from a feature from the Story of Seasons games called Rival Marriages, which allowed players to encourage NPCs to marry each other — something not possible in Stardew Valley. But while the Story of Seasons games at the time only supported heterosexual relationships (although the series has since improved its gay representation), kspace’s Starcrossed mod Stardew Valley introduced straight and queer NPC pairings.

“I really wanted to see Alex and Sam as a couple,” she says of the two Stardew Valley characters who are candidates for a player relationship. “I feel like their characters complement each other in a really interesting way, and I think Alex’s story (when you marry him as a male farmer) lends itself well to a relationship with another man.”

This is something I found as a player. Alex’s confrontation with the farmer’s sporty, casual misogyny – “If you weren’t a girl I’d ask you to play catch” – is pretty disgusting, but marry your male farmer and you get a gay storyline in which he reveals he was confused about his feelings, and his grandfather George’s struggle to overcome his homophobia.

“I love that even though it’s such a small, subtle detail, those considerations are still there,” says Jack Ivel, a non-binary crochet artist. “You don’t exactly feel like an afterthought, even with how much more open the game is.”

Evil’s current project is a major dedication to Stardew Valley: a crochet version of the in-game map they’ve been crafting row by row since April of last year. Their weekly video updates have received hundreds of thousands of views across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube; Longtime viewers have noticed changes in more than just the map: “I started taking testosterone about two months before this series started,” Ifill says. “So you can really hear my voice changing, probably within the first five updates I’ve done. A lot of people have commented on it in a very positive way, talking about how happy they’ve been to see my transition along with the map progressing.”

Aside from the inclusion of queer stories, and the relative safety of games deemed “for women,” Evil theorizes that Stardew Valley is popular with gay players because “there’s something within the game that’s a fundamental part of it, and that’s its inherently anti-capitalist message.”

In Stardew Valley, your farm deed comes from Grandpa in an envelope to be opened “on a day when you feel crushed by the burden of modern life,” which features your character struggling with an office job at a company named Joja. When she escapes corporate life to the titular Stardew Valley, it turns out Joja is there too, with a supermarket that rivals the small town store. Players can also purchase a Joja Membership which allows them to use their in-game earnings to speed up city upgrades rather than unlocking them by tackling a full range of in-game activities – foraging, farming, fishing, mining, etc. – but this is clearly not Baron’s preferred path.

Lizard Lee, a YouTuber with over 200,000 subscribers, also appreciates the anti-capitalist message. “It hit me hard on the nose, but I accidentally learned all these lessons about how to reconnect with what I love in cosplay while working on a cosplay from a game about recovering from burnout,” they say in a video about their cosplay based on Stardew Valley character Emily.

“Emily was my favorite in the game,” Lee adds. “I will always be drawn to the tailoring character, and I love her seriousness and enthusiasm.” But the biggest motivation was comfort. I made this costume for me in the height of summer, in sub-optimal temperatures for binding their chests like they did with their other costumes. But physical comfort didn’t come at the expense of comfort with their gender presentation: “Cosplay is about transitioning. No one expects you to look like an anime hero or a Disney princess when it’s late at night and you’re out of cosplay. Having that class where I didn’t need the affect and feelings of ‘the role’ outside of it was integral to discovering my own transness.”

The resulting outfit is a summery interpretation of Emily’s blue-haired, coral-clad sprite, which includes a long cotton ribbon with a measuring tape design (because she sews), a crochet headband (she taught herself for this cosplay) and a rainbow quartz bracelet (because she loves crystals, “and she’s also gay, which is a fact of the reality I live in”). Created over the course of several days and viewed by tens of thousands of people, Leigh’s costume is just one of many tributes to this 10-year-old game whose designer could not have predicted the art it would inspire and the community it would create.

It’s important to recognize, following its 10th anniversary in February, that there was more to Stardew Valley than just comfortable escapism — it supported identities and creativity, and presented an anti-capitalist, non-normative vision of a society that inspired many of its players.

“The thing about queerness is that because it’s an identity you have to develop in relation to other people…queer people are always looking for community in a big way. And Stardew Valley is really a community,” Lee says.