Stardew Valley is a cozy video game whose plot kicks off when your character flees the industrial big city for a small farm you inherit after the death of your beloved grandfather. That farm is located in a region called Stardew Valley, which faces the threat of being overtaken by a corporation named JojaMart. JojaMart’s goal is to turn the town’s Community Center into a corporate warehouse, and is set on running its only competitor in the region – a small business struggling to keep up – into the ground.
Stardew Valley, for the most part, is a comfortable farming simulator. Game play includes expanding your farm, taking care of your crops, and taking care of your animals. The player always has the choice to stick to only the farm, but you are actively encouraged to explore all the nooks and crannies of the game. From befriending a shadow creature named Krobus to forming relationships with town residents, the player inadvertently becomes a part of the town community over the course of playing the game.
And it’s an accepting community, too. Stardew Valley is a game beloved in queer circles especially for its acceptance of queer players. You can date anyone of any gender in the game, and if you figure out that you are transgender during a run of Stardew Valley, a wizard can literally help your character transition. Who needs the American healthcare system when you have magic HRT?
But there is a darkness looming over the town, and it’s one that many rural communities in the United States face: a predatory corporation stamping out the community in favor of corporate loyalty. JojaMart’s low prices force more impoverished folks in the town to shop there instead of the small business owned by Pierre, and have products available that Pierre simply cannot supply until your farmer character specializes and sells artisan goods to Pierre to sell at his shop. At one point in the game, a representative from JojaMart named Morris enters Pierre’s shop without warning during the height of busy hours and announces a sudden sale at JojaMart, promptly emptying Pierre’s shop of its customers.
JojaMart, with its blue and white corporate aesthetics, is harshly reminiscent of Wal-Mart. The two share the same business type and model, and make its employees share a similar dress code. Their buildings look the same, too!
They even share the same propaganda. As discussed in the previous paragraph, the type of rhetoric JojaMart and Wal-Mart uses make them out to be the “good guy” with the antagonist being small businesses due to their higher prices.
Examples of Wal-Mart advertisements like this include this one from their weekly ad cycle, released on January 3rd 2016:
The above advertisement suggests to the consumer that in purchasing Wal-Mart products, they are in turn saving money and therefore time. This time could be used for being with family, enjoying life, and doing “what matters most”.
But this has problematic turns: the advertisement suggests that time is something to be bought or spent, and it emphasizes a significant stress on its limitations. Time is of value, and therefore a marketable product.
In Stardew Valley, time is strictly cut off at 2am every in-game day. At this time, the player character collapses out of exhaustion. You wake up the next day in bed, with medical charges from either Harvey (the town doctor) or JojaMart. While Harvey takes care of your character on a medical basis, what JojaMart does is just plain creepy. A JojaMart representative simply finds you in a heap on the ground, pockets some money, and breaks into your home to toss you into your own bed.
Tangent aside, time is a restricted thing in Stardew Valley, exercised or quantified not by any corporate power but by the ability of the player character. It follows, in that way, spoon theory. Christine Miserandino’s article, The Spoon Theory, defines it through an analogy of spoons. A disabled person only has so many spoons, spoons being a stand-in for allotments of energy. Due to their limitations, they have to carefully choose where their energy goes.
Doing activities in Stardew Valley, from fishing to watering your crops, require both time and energy. These things are precious, and make the player account for them in a similar fashion that disabled people do with Spoon Theory. With time solely in the hands of the player, it’s in that way anti-capitalist.
Rogé Karma’s article for The Atlantic, “The Walmart Effect” discusses the impact of the mega corporation on rural communities. Following two studies – the first conducted by social scientists Lukas Lehner and Zachary Parolin and the economists Clemente Pignatti and Rafael Pintro Schmitt, and the second conducted by economist Justin Wiltshire – found that communities were left worse overall. (Karma)
Why, you might ask?
“The theory is complex, and goes like this: When Walmart comes to town, it uses its low prices to undercut competitors and become the dominant player in a given area, forcing local mom-and-pop grocers and regional chains to slash their costs or go out of business altogether. As a result, the local farmers, bakers, and manufacturers that once sold their goods to those now-vanished retailers are gradually replaced by Walmart’s array of national and international suppliers.”
(Karma)
Sound familiar? It should. This is exactly what JojaMart does to Stardew Valley if allowed to run rampant.
There is an element of player control to this, however. There are two main narratives that Stardew players can follow: one where they help repair the Community Center and effectively kick JojaMart out of town, and the other where they can instead aid JojaMart in its efforts to dominate the region.
On a personal note, I don’t have the heart to pursue the JojaMart narrative. It is significantly more profitable than the game’s other ending, but it’s just depressing to me. While you can make a significant amount more money and expand by selling out to the corporation, the community is unable to thrive in the ways that it should be able to.
In repairing the Community Center, you can specialize and expand. You can unlock public transportation to a nearby city, allowing Shane, one of the characters in town, to be able to consistently receive much needed mental health care. Pam, another villager who you get to know over the course of the game, is able to get a job as a bus driver. In this route, you can see the people around you begin leading better lives with JojaMart driven out of town.
When trapped in the JojaMart ending, Shane continues to drink through his depression and Pam keeps struggling to get by.
To bring about a real life example of its failure, Wal-Mart attempted to expand into Germany, and flopped for a variety of reasons that David McDonald sassily iterates in his article, for Medium “Why Walmart Failed in Germany”. He states the following:
“Fiendish as it sounds, Walmart employees are required to stand in formation and chant, ‘WALMART! WALMART! WALMART!’ while performing synchronized group calisthenics. Unfortunately, this form of corporate boosterism didn’t go over particularly well with the Germans…maybe they found this oddly aggressive, mindless and exuberant exercise in group-think too reminiscent of other rallies….like one that occurred in Nuremberg several decades earlier.”
(McDonald)
McDonald continues, citing the following:
“Another issue was the smiling. Walmart requires its checkout people to flash smiles at customers after bagging their purchases. Plastic bags, plastic junk, plastic smiles. But because the German people don’t usually smile at total strangers, the spectacle of Walmart employees grinning like jackasses not only didn’t impress consumers, it unnerved them.”
(McDonald)
To move on from his wonderful amount of sarcasm, McDonald raises ethical issues that Germany as a whole could not move past – things from Wal-Mart’s requirement at the time for employees to spy on one another to their excessive use of plastic and rejection of labor unions.
While it took much more in reality to squash the corporation from having control over a region, this example shows that it is possible, and Stardew Valley gives us hope by letting the player have a personal impact on the game’s narrative.
Stardew Valley, as a video game, is a powerful tool in illustrating the heart of a community and the impacts people have on others. It’s about not bending to corporate control (the game encourages players to not work with JojaMart, though you have the free will and ability to do so – leading to the JojaMart narrative of the game) and being a part of something.
Works Cited
ConcernedApe. Stardew Valley.
“Jan. 3rd 2016 Ad.” Wal-Mart Weekly Ad, 3 Jan. 2016.
Karma, Rogé. “The Walmart Effect.” The Atlantic, 24 Dec. 2024,
http://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2024/12/walmart-prices-poverty-economy/681122/.
McDonald, David. “Why Walmart Failed In Germany.” Medium,
medium.com/the-global-millennial/why-walmart-failed-in-germany-f1c3ca7eea65. Originally published in The Global Millennial, 21 Mar. 2017.
Miserandino, Christine. “The Spoon Theory.” Lymphoma Action, 2020. Originally published in But You Don’t Look Sick?, 2003.
If you made it this far…have a picture of Krobus! (Below)
Sprockets and Springes 