Making a Culturally Inclusive Farming Sim
Tags: posts, from dreamwidth, farming sim, meta,
Some thoughts about making farming sims more culturally inclusive, including observations on how other games have approached it. I haven't come to any firm conclusions. Also making farming sims is really hard, so I'm going to stick to visual novels for now >.>
Stardew Valley is American, and very culturally Christian, with not!Christmas, not!Easter etc. But the genre grew from Japanese games like Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon. All of them have a calendar consisting of four 28 day months that line up with the seasons.
I’ve only played Animal Crossing: New Horizons, whose events combine stuff like cherry blossom viewing, Lunar New Year, and Autumn fireworks with not!Easter, Halloween, and a December ‘Festive Season’, and also has things like Museum day and June Weddings whose cultural context I don’t recognise. Afaict the only explicit inclusion of other sorts of festivals is through sales of special items, like a grape backpack sold during the European grape harvest festival. But yeah: fine if you’re Japanese, fairly comfortable if you’re culturally Christian, but afaict pretty alienating for everyone else. Which is less of a problem for games aimed squarely at the Japanese market, but AC:NH is clearly trying to be inclusive of an international market and just being lazy about it (see also: the clunky integration of Southern Hemisphere seasons with date-based events)
My Time At Portia is Chinese and it’s festivals are much less familiar to me, though I don’t know how much of this is Chinese culture I’m not recognising and how much is original to the game. For example, the mid-Winter festival involves everyone coming together to make a hot-pot, and the Spring festival involves everyone being given random gifts. There’s also a Day of Memories, which I did recognise as drawing on Chinese traditions, where everyone releases lanterns to remember people they know who died. I don’t know how this would all read to people more immersed in mainstream Chinese culture (especially those who feel stifled by it) but it does give an example of a different way of doing things.
The American game Verdant Skies took a very different approach: It's scifi rather than fantasy, and is about a group of humans from Earth settling an uninhabited alien planet. The calendar just has two seasons: regular, and a short 'eclipse', where nothing grows. There are no festivals, just events that occur based on player actions. Since this is a new colony, there are no traditions. I think this approach is great, but it's very genre specific.
A very interesting conversation about making a Jewish Stardew Valley.
If I ever get around to making a game like this, I’d want festivals that aren’t part of any specific culture but are either entirely original or gesture towards a variety of real world festivals instead of being culturally narrow. But I’m not 100% sure what that would look like, and would have to have a lot of conversations with people of different faiths and cultural backgrounds.
There’s also the fact that having four seasons at all is very culturally specific! Here in Perth, we never get snow, and our seasons are better captured by the local indigenous Noongar 6 season calendar. Using the usual 4 Northern Hemisphere seasons that don’t resemble my own experience irritates me, but using the Noongar calendar in a game not set in the real world would feel a bit fraught and would also affect game balance. I mean farming + Australia is...pretty fraught in general.
As mentioned in the Jewish Stardew Valley post, even things like what day the week starts on, what counts as the start of the day etc are culturally specific.
What would a game based on, say, Singaporean culture and climate look like?
Then there's religion. Animal Crossing has absolutely no explicit references to any religion as far as I can tell, but has a lot of obvious influences from Christian, Buddhist and Shinto culture, as well as "celebration candles" that are clearly a memorah, and probably other stuff I'm forgetting.
Stardew Valley and My Time At Portia both created original religious groups clearly modeled on Christianity that the narrative is ambivalent about.
But fantasy in general is very bad at looking beyond a Christian vs Not Religious dichotomy. In Western fantasy at best it's like: Humans worship not!Jesus, Orcs worship the Orc Goddess, there's an evil cult worshipping not!Satan, and maybe some scary not!Muslims on the edge of the map. Obviously a farming game doesn't have space for a lot of in-depth religious worldbuilding, but I think the genre can definitely do better.
The only reference to religion I remember in Verdant Skies is one of the characters being explicitly Baha'i, and they have opinions on fishing etc related to that. It would be very easy to include one or more Jewish/Muslim etc characters in this sort of game, and the challenge of fitting religious observance into the unusual calendar could be explored by the characters during the narrative. The player character could maybe choose whether they follow any of the included religious approaches (or for that matter, dietary restrictions like being vegan or vegetarian)
I think an inherent problem with the farming sim genre is that it generally wants to draw on fuzzy warm feelings about Traditional Farming Life, but at least in Australia and the US all those fuzzy feelings are inextricably entwined with a violently racist, colonialist past, and just taking the overt racism and colonialism out doesn't remove the subtext. Like, what does it mean to make a game set in a clearly US-inspired farming community that implies the community has been there since time immemorial and the closest thing to any indigenous people is little helpful nature spirits? Obviously it's drawing on the similar setup in the Harvest Moon games but (a) Japanese bucolic fantasy has it's own unfortunate history and (b) Stardew Valley is clearly American and not Japanese, which changes the context.
But I'm not sure what a better version would look like, without throwing out the basic structure of a farming sim set in a fantasy world that draws on mainstream (and thus largely white) US culture without being set in the real US. Ditto for the Australian equivalent.
Something I've pondered is a game set in like...fairyland. But "I'll avoid erasing indigenous people by setting my story in quasi-Europe" is, uh...imperfect.
So yeah, no firm conclusions, but these are my thoughts.