Stardew Valley is Not an Anti-Capitalist Masterpiece

I played Stardew Valley a lot in the past year and am currently doing a cooperative run with my partner. When it was first released, I hyper-fixated on it for a few months and then lost interest for several years. Then, a global pandemic trapped us in our homes and I yearned for the escapism the game promised. My interest had also been rekindled after seeing some discourse about it in various leftist groups; I was a teenager when I first played the game, so if it had some kind of critique of capitalism in it, it was lost on me at the time, but in the present day I’ve been very curious to uncover its hidden anti-capitalist sentiment.

Back in May 2020, I was fresh off a playthrough of Pixel Pushers Union 512’s Tonight We Riot, a fantastic sidescrolling brawler where the proletariat fights back against the capitalist regime, which set my benchmark for an anti-capitalist video game. As I ventured back into Stardew Valley’s cozy farming simulator, I was disappointed with the surface-level critique I found. I had grown accustomed to games like The Outer Worlds or the Bioshock where the games quite openly comment on the cruelties of capitalism. The critiques are flawed but at least they say something of substance compared to Stardew Valley. The internet had led me to believe that the critique offered by Stardew Valley was on the same level – it isn’t.

At the start of the game, your playable character works a dull office job at Joja Corporation – the equivalent of Amazon in this universe. They receive a letter from their sickly grandfather. In a cliched storytelling moment, you are told not to open this letter until all joy has been sucked out of your life. Time passes, your grandfather passes away, and you grow increasingly tired of your office job. Eventually, you open the letter to find that you have inherited your grandfather’s old farm on the outskirts of Pelican Town in Stardew Valley. 

You arrive to discover a wild, overgrown farm. It’s your job to restore it to its former glory. Armed with a set of old tools and a handful of seeds, you set out to till the land and discover a new life in the cozy valley. The game’s narrative pathway quickly reveals itself to you when you’re brought to the community center by the leader of Pelican Town, Mayor Lewis. He informs you that there is a rodent problem in the building, but rather than routing out a family of mice, you discover that Juminos, small forest spirits, have taken have made the center their home instead. They present you with a variety of bundles you can complete in exchange for various rewards. As you turn in these bundles, the Juminos start rebuilding and cleaning up parts of the valley, such as a greenhouse on your farm or blockages in front of late-game sections. 

However, the game also quickly reminds you of the presence of the Joja Corporation. They have established a Joja Mart – a cold, uninviting supermarket – nearby in the town. There’s a narrative pathway whereby you can buy a Joja membership. This enables Joja Mart to take over the community center converting it into a warehouse. Instead of collecting items to exchange with the Juminos, you pay money to Joja to complete its own community development projects. 

This is where the anti-capitalist critique of the game allegedly lies. It supposedly wears anti-corporate capitalism proudly on its sleeves, signaling that no good comes from engaging with Joja Mart. The company is presented as evil – the embodiment of the horrors of rural decay at the hand of real-world corporations like Shell and Walmart. It is, quite literally, a massive company coming into town and driving out any of the competition. Joja Mart has higher prices than the local general store, but they employ cunning marketing, faux promises of a better life, and outrageous specials to lure in customers. You can see the analogues between Joja Mart and most major retail chains. They promise a sense of exclusivity and the allure of a “better” life, but at the expense of dismantling the small businesses that are trying to eke out a living in a small rural town. 

However, the critique doesn’t do much beyond this. It’s one-dimensional. It’s solely a critique of corporate capitalism and does little to present alternatives to it, aside from a pastoral, agrarian form of capitalism. The Joja Mart path shows us the totality of corporate capitalism. One corporation controls every means of production and totally exploits the local community. The community center narrative wrenches control away from Joja Mart but rather than returning the means of production to everyone in the town, it trades one boss for another, and makes you the sole driving force behind its market economy.

Much of this stems from the reliance on a market-based economy as a game mechanic, to drive progress in the story. Many moments in the game, such as receiving a pet, are determined by meeting a certain gold threshold. There is nothing inherently wrong with this – it is a standard feature of most RPGs. You won’t be punished for dumping hundreds of potatoes into the market at a time – you will receive the same amount of gold for each potato and Pierre will continue to act like he isn’t buying your crops to resell at a higher price. 

The natural progression of the game is that you accumulate resources. The reality is that you only get to experience the richness of content in the game much later. Your first year is spent aggressively juggling tasks while trying to keep your farm afloat. This can be an incredibly frustrating experience especially since the day-night cycle of the game works aggressively against you. For a game described as an idyllic farming simulator, it loves reinforcing the idea that there are only so many hours in a day. 

So, you better work yourself to the bone to eke out every piece of efficiency from those days. You traded a 9-to-5 for the 24-hour maintenance of your farm. You often go to bed well after midnight only to rise at 6 am to do it all over again. If you pursue relationships, which is where all the juicy lore is, your farm falls into disarray. The game turns into a perverse parody of the rewards of a hard day’s work. The tedium of the office job is replaced by the romanticization of hard labor and the exploitation of the land for market gains.

The obvious alternative would be for the community to rally alongside you to seize the means of production, especially since you already own the farm. It would be very simple to create a system whereby everyone equally exchanges their labor and skills to develop the community. The game does feature an aspect of this: your symbiotic relationship with the Juminos. There is an equal exchange of goods and services where you provide them with stuff they want, and they revitalize the town for you. The Juminos benefit by getting the resources they desire. You benefit by getting some nifty rewards, like even more seeds to plant to, uh, solidify your stranglehold on the local economy.

However, as the late disgrace, UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, once said, there is no alternative… to capitalism in Stardew Valley. The game has very specific systems that requires it to function. Stardew Valley may be a frustrating experience for the first year, but it is also deeply rewarding. There is a certain joy to the gameplay loop which explains why I and many others love it. It explains why many scan the text of the game to find a deeper meaning. 

Perhaps the deeper meaning is there, or perhaps we have all grown accustomed to yelling “death of the author” whenever someone mentions authorial intent. Concerned Ape, or Eric Barone, has not gone on the record about capitalist critique within the game. It is evident that he does not particularly like corporations, but that is not an inherently anti-capitalist sentiment. He instead proposes a vision of how to exist ethically under capitalism. 

The game accepts that market-based systems exist, but the way you exist underneath them is not to accumulate wealth or hoard resources. The way to live is to engage with your community. Stardew Valley’s rich gameplay comes from engaging with the villagers. Throughout the game, you can give the villagers gifts and slowly build relationships. Some villagers are cranky at first, such as Shane, but as you dig past his rough exterior – you learn about his heartbreaking story and his struggles with alcoholism and depression. Others, like Penny, are sweet and wholesome. These stories would never be uncovered if you focused on exploiting the market to its fullest. It is possible to play Stardew Valley and never speak to anyone beyond buying the resources you need. It further reminds us that Stardew Valley was not designed to be anti-capitalist. It’s intended to be a rewarding player experience with multiple ways to play.

The game’s narrative underscores the value of community and that investment in a community strengthens it. At its core, the game has communitarian themes. The community grows with the farmer as you complete community center bundles. It is here where I think people ascribe a lot of anti-capitalist sentiment to the game – aside from the critiques of Joja Mart. This is a fundamentally flawed conclusion as communitarianism is not inherently anti-capitalist. It is a facet of many anti-capitalist utopias, but it is not a defining feature.

The reality is that Stardew Valley is an RPG bound by the rules of its genre. Be kinder to your community. Support a small business and punch a corporate fascist. I’m going to find precious metals to feed to my rock-eating girlfriend.