So much digital ink has been spilled over the game Stardew Valley^[1] that one would think there is little else to say. The game is an indie darling, for starters, built (initially at least) by a lone developer toiling away for years^[2] to perfect the look, feel and gameplay. It has been ported to numerous platforms, piqued the curiosity of countless gamers, and even burbled across media formats (as evidenced by the fact I’m sitting here in arms-length of an official cookbook^[3] based on the game.)

Personally I’ve spent more hours than I’d care to admit in this little pixelated world (though not nearly as many as my daughter, who is the one who owns the cookbook.)

Yet among all the lessons of game design and creative struggle that are mixed into this game, there is a noteworthy point to be made about what it’s style says with respect to its popularity: it’s a pretty game, sure, but it’s also a pixelated cartoon abstraction with corny dialog and filled with absurdist elements.

In a landscape of game design where computational power and photorealism seem to be what every triple-A game developer is striving, the raw humanity evoked by the pixelated purity of a game like Stardew Valley is telling. This game is not popular because of any other reason than it feels like something made by a person for people to enjoy. It oozes humanity. It’s cozy and friendly and feels more real than a list of other more “produced” games that is too long to itemize.

Why is that?

If there was an easy answer that I could distill into my social media excerpt then surely I’d be working for some gaming company as a seven-figure consultant and not writing spec pieces on a private blog… but I do think that the answer is mixed up in this ineffable concept of authenticity, a topic I’ve been exploring on this private blog for as long as I’ve been writing it. I think Stardew Valley nails the plot on that idea, and tells us all something about what we really want from out culture, our art, and our pastimes, and that thing does not gurgle out of a slop engine or get built by a committee or necessarily gleam with pixel-perfect realism. 

It succeeds because it tells a good story, and not just through the plot, but through the making of it and the often-visible tool marks in the final product.