Playful rehearsals of animal subjugation: The naturalization of animal labour in videogames

Abstract

In videogames, players commonly encounter virtual animals who perform labour for human benefit. Animal labour is not only physical, but increasingly involves labours of bonding and love which invest the player in the animal's liveliness alongside their utility. This article analyses Stardew Valley, interrogating the ways in which the player encounters and builds relationships with labouring virtual animals. It argues that, through these player-animal relationships, the player rehearses orientations towards animal life which take for granted their subjugation. In Stardew Valley, animals express love in ways which not only obscure their subjugated position, relative to humans, in relationships of domination, but also encourage the player to reproduce those relationships on an expanding scale. This is a naturalization of animal subjugation which, in part, justifies real practices of industrial animal agriculture which lead not only to constant cycles of mass animal death, but also contribute to climate disaster.

Introduction

In Red Dead Redemption 2's (Rockstar Studios, 2018) wild west, horses fulfil an important role as means of transportation. As the player spends time with their own horse, “bonding” with them by feeding them good food, petting them to reassure them, and grooming them, the virtual animal learns to love their rider, the player-avatar, unambiguously. At the time, reviewers noted that these bonding mechanics changed how they interacted with the game-world, treating their ‘horse with a realistic respect’ (Reilly, 2018) and resisting the temptation to buy and sell horses, since the existing bond between virtual horse and rider is ‘the one constant in your life’ (Webster, 2018). This example shows how “other animal” ¹ labour is naturalized in videogames through its dual commodification: as a virtual commodity, which the player owns for its function as transportation, and as an “encounter value” (Barua, 2016; Haraway, 2007), an experiential and affective component of a commodified game-world.

This is one of many examples of loving, subjugated virtual animal commodities in videogames. Horse mounts are common in games, and bonding mechanics accompany those horses in games such as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo, 2017) and its sequel (Nintendo, 2023), Assassin's Creed: Valhalla (Ubisoft Montreal, 2020), and Red Dead Redemption 2. Similar tropes extend beyond just horse mounts: the other animals of farming games like Stardew Valley (ConcernedApe, 2016), pet games like Nintendogs (Nintendo, 2005), and role-playing games like the recent Pokémon games (Game Freak, 2022) each include bonding mechanics between player-avatars and other animal companions. These tropes are indicative of the pervasive and naturalized subjugation of other animals to human benefit within videogame narratives. Those games in which horses become transport, or chickens and cows become food-producers – or simply “absent referents” (Adams, 2010: 13) of their meat – are notable because they are instances of subjugation in which antagonism is absent. When they appear, animals that labour for human benefit are presented as content, happy in their subjugated position.

Representations of other animal labour have been investigated in other contexts, including film, television, advertising, and literature (Arcari, 2018; Cole and Stewart, 2014; Linne, 2016; Parry, 2010; Pilgrim, 2013; Wadiwel, 2022), but relatively little attention has been paid to representations of animal labour in videogames. This is despite the frequent role of animals as subjugated labourers working for human, and specifically player, interests. The importance of such representations in videogames is in the processes and relationships they encourage and naturalize through what game scholars often describe as rehearsal (Ruberg, 2019; Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, 2009). In commanding other animals’ labour, the player is exposed to rule-based systems through which they choose to perform animal subjugation, rehearsing its underlying logics and justifications. This subjugation, in turn, contributes to the continued reliance on and justification of other animals as food-animals: an unsustainable practice, the real-life industry around which plays a prominent role in oncoming climate disaster (Steffen et al., 2015; Steinfeld et al., 2006).

Videogames’ naturalization of other animals as labouring commodities, particularly livestock, raise a number of concerns, including obscuring the role of livestock in ‘direct environmental pollution, greenhouse gas production, human health impacts of consumption and labour, effects on communities, zoonotic disease and ethical questions around the killing of animals’ (Twine, 2012: 12). The production of meat and animal products kills over eighty billion other animals annually (FAO, 2023), and accounts for between fifteen and twenty-four percent of greenhouse gas emissions (Fiala, 2008: 412; see also Steinfeld et al., 2006) – a number which is slowly decreasing in “developed” countries as it dramatically increases in “developing” countries (Caro et al., 2014). This is to say that the persistence of what Noske (1989) calls the “animal industrial complex”, a term used to connect the expansion and intensification of industrial animal agriculture to capital accumulation, is not only ethically condemnable, but ecologically disastrous (Steffen et al., 2015).

Of course, the naturalized subjugation and commodification of animal products and other animal labour does not fall wholly on videogames. However, videogames are significant because of how they function. They naturalize not only through representation and normalization, but also through rehearsal. The notion of “rehearsal” is used by a range of game studies scholars (Cole and Stewart, 2014; Dooghan, 2019; Dwyer, 2022; Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, 2009; Ford, 2016; Gallagher, 2018; Harkin, 2021; Jennings, 2022; Phillips, 2018; Ruberg, 2019) to refer to how ‘cultural values often become literalized in the form of play affordances, incentive structures, and point systems’ (Ruberg, 2019: 316), and are engaged with, internalized and performed through play. This is to say that, rather than simply representing human-other animal relationships, videogames also encourage players to perform those relationships, interrogating and internalizing dispositions towards other animals which are incentivised through digital wealth and praise from non-player characters. This is a process through which videogames invite players to rehearse ‘cultural scripts’ (Dwyer, 2022: par. 31) or ‘socially stipulated subjectivites’ (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, 2009: 192) that make the subjugation of other animals appear natural and desirable.

This article analyses Stardew Valley, showing how the subjugation of animal labour is naturalized through playful rehearsals. Stardew Valley has been chosen because it provides a clear case study of logics justifying other animal subjugation, which are rehearsed in cycles of virtual commodity production. Prior research on the game has focused on its socially progressive troubling of the “rural idyll” (Sutherland, 2020) and the “left-wing” utopian socioeconomics of Stardew Valley's farm life (Mackay and Roberts, 2023). The game has also been identified as a “cosy game”, both in game scholarship (Waszkiewicz and Bakun, 2020) and game journalism (Jessey et al., 2023; Morton, 2023; Segarra, 2023). Cosy games are described as offering ‘safe, emotional, heart-warming experiences… [they are] not a fulfilment of a fantasy of greatness, but rather a fantasy of stability and safety’ (Waszkiewicz and Bakun, 2020: 228). Against these readings, however, I argue that Stardew Valley's ostensible social progressivism and “cosy aesthetics” serve to mask the commodification and exploitation of other animals, and obscure that player-other animal interactions involve rehearsals of domination and subjugation.

This article offers a reading of Stardew Valley that focuses on commodity-other animals and their performances of emotional labour. Several other types of animal life are present in Stardew Valley, such as the “monsters” and violent bats found in the depths of caves, and the wild animals that are occasionally seen enjoying the spaces seemingly outside of the purview of capitalist production. However, this article is interested in the underexamined ways in which players’ and other animals’ ludic performances of bonding reify exploitation and subjugation. While it is possible to read Stardew Valley's player-other animal interactions as progressive rehearsals of care and love, within these interactions there is still the problem of other animal subjugation which is instrumental to both climate change and other animal suffering. Stardew Valley's players might intend to care for their animals, and perhaps these relationships can play a part in transforming player subjectivity, but such transformations only occur insofar as humans have the capacity to dominate other animals at will. This analysis focuses on the processes facilitated through player-game interactions, and the dispositions towards other animal life encouraged by such interactions, rather than an empirical investigation of players themselves.

The lack of studies which connect videogames, rehearsal and representations of subjugated animals means that a key way in which naturalization functions in videogames is overlooked in discussions of media representations of other animal commodities. Other animals who labour for the benefit of players are so pervasive in videogames as to appear natural. This article begins with a review of the literature on other animals in videogames. It then outlines its theoretical approach, drawing on Haraway's (2007) concept of “encounter value” to understand the unique place of other animals within capitalist economies. Then, following a short description of Stardew Valley, it analyses the game with particular focus on other animal labour. The article concludes by arguing that bonding mechanics and loving relationships with virtual other animals not only obscure subjugation and exploitation, but also compel the player to actively reproduce those relationships in-game through rehearsals of subjectivities which assume other animals’ submission to human domination.

Other animals in videogames

The growing body of research on other animals in videogames is focused in two areas. The first of these investigates the subversive potential of digital entanglements involving players, and other animal avatars and non-player-characters (Bianchi, 2017; Caracciolo, 2021; Cremin, 2016; Fuchs, 2020; Krekhov et al., 2019; Tyler, 2022; Westerlaken, 2017). The second focuses on critiques of the placement of such other animals as objects of player violence in videogames (Chittaro and Sioni, 2012; Elton, 2000; Molloy, 2011; Tyler, 2022; van Ooijen, 2018), and critiques their commodification within virtual cycles of commodity production (Cole and Stewart, 2014; Tyler, 2015; Tyler, 2022). Alongside the main body of research, focused on subversion and critique, there are a number of other important areas of research in which other animals appear. These fall into a few different areas, including the work of Fothergill and Flick (2015) and Jański (2016), who each propose typologies of other animals in videogames, Chang's (2019) book length study of ecology in videogames, and the work of numerous scholars who investigate digital animals more broadly (Adams, 2020; Lippit, 2000; Turkle, 2011; Wallin, 2022).

This final group of scholars are concerned with the ways in which human-other animal interactions increasingly rely on digital technologies. Their research looks at both the digital footprints of real animals (Adams, 2020) and the increasing prominence of digital or artificial animals in human lives (Turkle, 2011; Lippit, 2000). In each case there is both an acknowledgement that encounters with digital animals often produce real, emotionally engaging experiences, alongside the ‘concern that the virtual and the digital will come to supplant the organic and real in the minds and affections of the public’ (Adams, 2020: par. 23), leading to a devaluation of digital animals’ real counterparts.

Looking at the subversive potential of other animal avatars, however, Fuchs (2020), Caracciolo (2021) and Tyler (2022) argue that player-other animal avatar relationships have the capacity to trouble human-animal distinctions by making the player part of a human-animal avatar assemblage, the other animal avatar being ‘a molecular entity which allows players to exceed the manifold limits of their physical bodies’ (Fuchs, 2020: 265). Both draw from Cremin's (2016) use of the Deleuzo-Guattarian notion of “becoming-animal” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2021). Fuchs argues that, when they become part of the avatar assemblage in Bear Simulator (Farjay.com, 2016), the player engages with ‘nonhuman ways of being’ (Caracciolo, 2021: par. 10) which undermine human superiority through exposure to more-than-human perspectives. Caracciolo (2021) builds on this perspective in their reading of “animal mayhem games”, while acknowledging that the progressive potential of other animal avatars also demonstrates the capacity for human domination. The various essays in Tyler's (2022) collection explore the intersections between animals, violence, exploitation, and videogames. Among these arguments and explorations, Tyler offers praise for Dog's Life (Frontier Developments, 2003), which engages the player with mechanics that attempt to represent a dogs sense of smell. Key to Tyler's praise, and the subversive potential explored by other scholars, is that videogames offer more-than-human frameworks for engaging with animals and environments. At the same time, however, the player-other animal avatar assemblage also provides a technological system through which human players can control more-than-human worlds and their inhabitants (Caracciolo, 2021; Fuchs, 2020).

Similarly, Bianchi's (2017) research explores how videogames can foster more-than-human engagements not only with and in game-worlds, but also through game-worlds with other humans who enter into co-operative play as part of the "tentacular videogame" assemblage. Wallin (2022), on the other hand, uses an analysis of multiple videogames to conceptualise and critique human-other animal relationships in the Capitalocene, and imagine human-other animal futures in worlds marked by the extermination of life. Both Bianchi (2017) and Wallin (2022) build on Haraway's (2007; 2016) work conceptualising interspecies relationships and kinships, proposing new ways of thinking about human-other animal entanglements which involve digital and material worlds.

Where this research on player-other animal avatar relationships highlight the progressive or subversive potential of play, another branch focuses instead on critiques of player-other animal interactions and representations. Molloy (2011) explores violence in popular hunting videogames as part of a broader discussion of “recreational killing” in popular media. They argue that notions of realistic gameplay legitimate those forms of animal murder which follow the ‘rules and obligations that the hunter must adhere to, which are thought to even up the odds for the hunted animals’ (Molloy, 2011: 141) by constructing a humane, fair perception of hunting. Other critiques focus on commodification. For example, Cole and Stewart's (2014) study of the eternally young puppies of the Nintendogs franchise (Nintendo, 2005)analyses their subjugated position as living commodities which exist primarily to please their human owners. They also explore the capitalistic logics of social media farming games, in which ‘Open-ended gameplay…reveals an imaginary vista of infinite expansion, wealth and control’ (Cole and Stewart, 2014: 135). Similarly, Tyler (2015; 2022) argues that the simplicity of representations of other animal life in farming games like Farmville(Zynga, 2009) sanitize the realities of animal agriculture.

A final branch of research consists of work which attempts to categorize the different functions of other animals in videogames. Fothergill and Flick (2015) propose a typology of videogame chickens which divides them according to the different “roles” they play – as “products” or as “domestic” animals, for example. Jański (2016), however, proposes two typologies of other animals in games. One divides according to the animals’ function, and the other according to the animals’ ontological status. For the former, Jański suggests categories such as “tool” and “companion”; for the latter, categories such as “actual representations” and “legendaries”. What is not explored in depth by Fothergill and Flick (2015) and Jański (2016), but is of interest in this article, is the way that categorizations of other animals as either producers (“product” or “tool”) or as companion (or “domesticated”) intersect, creating other animal companions which have loving relationships with players who structure their lives around their instrumental function.

Much of the existing literature is interested in how videogames can be used as tools for the progressive transformation of political subjectivities, particularly in orientations towards more-than-human life. Alternatively, it is aimed at critiquing the ways in which animals are subjected to human violence or caught up in circuits of commodity production. This article, however, argues that videogames featuring other animals work to maintain and the existing political order, which subjugates other animal life to human benefit, through rehearsals of loving relationships which justify human domination and control over other animal labour. These loving relationships are extremely common, encountered as horse mounts, farm animals and other animal companions. Yet, particularly regarding animal labour, they are rarely of scholarly interest.

Encounter value

To this end, some conceptualization of animal labour is necessary. This article uses Haraway's (2007) concept of “encounter value”, and follows Barua (2016) and Wadiwel (2018) in their applications and extensions of the concept. These authors use the concept in research which investigates human relationships with real animals, with Barua's work alone extending the concept to virtual or “disembodied renditions”. Barua explains that encounter value ‘can be thought of as that process of value generation where bodies, ethologies and liveliness of an animal makes a difference to, and is constitutive of, those very relations that render or mobilize it as a commodity’ (Barua, 2016: 728, emphasis in original). Multispecies encounters occur in “contact zones” (Haraway, 2007: 4), in which entanglements of human and other animal labour produce animals as commodities; it is in the co-constitutive relation of the encounter, rather than the more traditional Marxist notion of “use” (as in “use value”), that gives other animal commodities value. For Haraway (2007: 45–47), encounter value explains the value of companion animals: unlike other commodities, they are not objectified or “dead” human labour purchased for its perceived use; rather they are living, labouring beings that we desire for their “liveliness” (Barua, 2016). This article draws from Wadiwel (2018) in expanding use of the concept to forms of animal labour, particularly the labour of commodity production, and it draws from Barua (2016) in applying the concept to human-virtual other animal relationships.

Wadiwel's (2018) research, which focuses on the role of animal resistance in developing animal agriculture, assists in the application of these concepts to circuits of commodity production, like those of milk or egg production, which involve animal labour. Cows and chickens grow, and they eat; they want to live, and they resist their subjugation. Other animals’ growth requires multispecies encounters. They are fed by humans, rounded up and protected by trained dogs, sheared, weighed, tagged, and otherwise managed in ways which produce and reproduce the subjugated other animal. Wadiwel argues that farmers use machines to lessen the labour of, and therefore risk to, the farmer and noncompliant other animals in these encounters. Farmers, freed from some responsibilities by machinery, can now manage larger numbers of livestock. ‘In a sense,’ Wadiwel claims, ‘the chicken harvesting machine seeks to save on one kind of labour (i.e., the human labour involved in countering animal resistance) to maximize the effectiveness of another labour time: that is, the labour time required from animals to produce themselves as commodities within the production process’ (Wadiwel, 2018: 529). Farmers do not purchase chicken's labour, as they do the wage labourer, or use chickens to make eggs like a tool they have complete control over; one buys the chicken itself, who they relate to through multispecies encounters which mobilize the chicken's liveliness in the production of eggs.

Where Wadiwel's concerns are the lived realities of other animals, Barua's (2016) provide insight as to how encounter value can be applied to virtual other animals. Barua argues that encounters with other animals can be “virtual”, involving ‘disembodied renditions, which amplify the charisma of animals and make them desirable for the voyeuristic gaze’, leading to “spectacular accumulation”, ‘a profit-driven mobilization of fetishized images and ideas, cleaved from social and political conditions of their production’ (Barua, 2016: 735). I contend that this also describes the farm animals of Stardew Valley. These animals have no former life; the player encounters them only in the context of an idyllic farm, where they are accumulated as a source of labour-power. Their charisma is “amplified” in the love they emote to the player. In these virtual encounters, players rehearse relationships of subjugation which naturalize the pervasive use of animal labour for human benefit.

Stardew Valley

Stardew Valley's opening cutscene depicts the player-character's escape from the office to the farm. Labouring on the farm, both player and player-character appear to have escaped the alienating conditions of labour relations in contemporary capitalism. The bright colours of the farm, the player-character's cheerful neighbours, and the heartening soundtrack contrast the dull, lifeless imagery of their office space; the farm is hopeful, lively, and vibrant.

The player is wrapped up in Stardew Valley's core gameplay loop immediately after the cutscene's end. Chiapello (2014: 9) defines a gameplay loop as ‘a portion of a game containing an objective, a challenge and a reward’. Gameplay loops keep players interested in playing the game by providing a succession of objectives and rewards which feed into one another, and generate further objectives and rewards, in a loop. In Stardew Valley, the player has objectives, such as the acquisition of better tools, backpacks, or machines. By overcoming challenges, such as the challenge of accumulating x amount of money or producing y amount of crafting materials with a limited daily amount of “energy” (which, in turn, influences the amount of labour-time which can be employed by capital in the workday), the player receives (or, purchases) their reward – tools which increase efficiency – and the process loops with a new set of objectives: now, the player can accumulate more, faster, and produce new materials, which can be used to acquire ever more efficient items or machines. This gameplay loop, it should be noted, is akin to the “spiral” of capital (Harvey, 2023; Marx, 1973), wherein the tendency to reduce the proportion of necessary labour and increase the proportion of surplus labour objectified in a commodity leads to the development of machines and labour saving devices. In both the game and capitalist economies more generally, labour saving devices are used to impose more work on labourers, since it frees up their time to be reallocated to production on an expanded scale.

Within capital's spiral form, the surplus value which is liberated from exchange (“liberated” in that it is value which, as surplus, is not yet tied up in circuits of exchange) is put towards increasing the mass of human labour employed by capital (Marx, 1973: 347–348). Within Stardew Valley's circuits of exchange, however, there are no unemployed humans who can be put to work. To expand the accumulation of surplus value beyond the capacities of their own daily labour power, the player must, therefore, look to other animals. The player can invest in the labour of cows, pigs, sheep, goats, chickens, ducks, rabbits and dinosaurs early in the game, and these animals proceed to act as semi-autonomous producers of commodities, a vital means of expanding production beyond the means of the lone player-character-worker.

Rehearsal and animal labour in Stardew Valley

Other animal labour in Stardew Valley can be divided into two categories: physical, and emotional. These categories roughly correspond to Fothergill and Flick's (2015) “role”-based typology and Jański's (2016) “function”-based typology, in that their physical labour makes the animals “products”, or commodity producers, whereas their performances of emotional labour make them “companions”: loving, domesticated animals. In Stardew Valley, however, the two are not neatly separable: the emotional labour naturalizes the subjugation of the physical, and both facilitate player rehearsals of capitalist subjectivities and orientations towards other animal labour. This analysis begins by looking at physical labour, before moving to performances of emotional labour.

Physical labour

The player encounters the physical labour of other animals in two ways: in the production of commodities, and in the production and reproduction of animal bodies. Commodity production occurs as virtual other animals use their bodies to create material commodities such as milk or eggs. To produce these commodities, however, the other animals labour on their own bodies: they eat and they graze so that they can be productive labourers; if they are unable to eat and graze, they will be unable to produce. They also produce more young animals, a process which does not depict any reproductive processes but rather in which new animals have a small chance of simply appearing, as if by magic, every morning.

Whether bought or born, other animals are always young when they come under the ownership of the player. Before they can produce milk, mayonnaise, or wool, other animals must “mature”. Maturation is an in-game process in which the animal, as long as they can eat and graze, will grow to adulthood over multiple in-game days (the length of time varying according to the species of animal). In this time, their on-screen representation will change from the smaller, skinnier visual representations of young animals to fully grown representations which are larger and bulkier. This represents a physical change resulting from the process of growth in which the object of the animal's labour is the animal itself, and it is only in this adult form that they can begin producing commodities. Eating and grazing eventually produces a mature other animal who produces alienable commodities. This process of maturation also relies on human input in form of food and shelter: without access to these factors, other animals will not eat or grow.

This constitutes Stardew Valley's farm as a contact zone, in which player-other animal encounters continually form and structure relationships of domination oriented around surplus value extraction. These are cross-species encounters in which the physical labour of humans and other animals produce and reproduce those animals as valuable commodities capable of producing animal products. These encounters also shape the farm, in that they require the player to grow (or purchase) hay and provide space for other animals to graze and find shelter; similarly, they shape market rhythms, since exchange can only take place after production. Both the lives of Stardew Valley's other animals and the organization of the farm itself are structured around productive encounters, which first produce the adult animal, and then animal products.

In encounters with other animals, players rehearse ‘socially stipulated subjectivities’ (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, 2009: 192) by choosing to adopt orientations towards other animals which link caring physical labour to the production of surplus value. Other animals are to be looked after, kept alive, insofar as it leads to their reproduction as efficient and semi-autonomous commodity producers. The few that do not need to be fed, such as pets and horses, continue to live without player intervention. Otherwise, there are no unproductive other animals on the virtual farm; the farm animals of Stardew Valley are productive beings. If they do not produce in their regular cycles, it is usually because the player failed to feed them or provide them access to their abode. The punishment for player neglect is that the other animals cease production.

This is a rehearsal of capitalist subjectivities which, in this case, tie care/neglect to production/nonproduction, encouraging the player to keep other animals well fed so that they continue to produce commodities. Where this means that productive animals are cared for, it also suggests an accompanying logic which justifies the neglect (or worse) of unproductive animals. This connects to practices in the actual dairy industry: historically, the uselessness of male dairy calves to dairy producers has justified real violence against them (Cave et al., 2005; Hulbert and Moisá, 2016). Male dairy calves must be absent from the virtual farm since, as other animals which would need to be fed but could not produce, they would be detrimental to the productive efficiency of the farm which is the purpose of care. Though their absence implies less violence on the virtual farm than it does on real farms, since they simply never exist, the logic justifying the absence is the same. Meat is absent from Stardew Valley's farm, yet the game encourages the player to take on and rehearse a subject position which excludes male dairy calves as unproductive, a logic which, in reality, leads to their slaughter.

In the relationship between player-owner and other animal labourers, the player rehearses subjectivities which view other animal life as subordinate to their encounter value. Only encounter values which can be integrated into the production of surplus value are useful to the owner, who desires that surplus. These are the logics of the Capitalocene. According to Moore (2016a; 2016b), as nature in the Capitalocene is organised according to the economic logics of capital, it becomes cheap in a dual sense. It is cheapened, ‘render[ed] inferior in an ethico-political sense’ (2016a: 3), while it is also made cheap in terms of price. The organisation of Stardew Valley's other animals to serve commodity production reflects this dual cheapening, the making-commodity and making-inferior of other animals, which is vital to the operation of capitalism.

Emotional labour

Beyond physical labour, it is common for virtual other animals to perform emotional labour for their player-owner's benefit. Just as the life of the player-character's horse in Red Dead Redemption 2 appears enriched by bonding encounters with the human-player, so too do Stardew Valley's livestock appear to enjoy their integration into circuits of commodity production. In-game market incentives push capital towards the complete reduction of other animals to functional instruments for the production of surplus value. This instrumentalization is obscured by justificatory discourses in which other animals appear as lively, emotional, and happy beings rather than instrumentalized labour power. Encounter value draws attention to how this liveliness, animals’ capacities to feel and exert agency over their own commodification, is itself subsumed into the production of surplus value. It is the performance of emotional labour from virtual other animals, their appearance as not simply use values but rather as commodities happy to be used, which naturalize their instrumentalization. These discourses have two components in Stardew Valley, one negative and one positive: firstly, the player cannot mistreat animals in ways which benefit production; secondly, if the player treats animals “well”, then the animals will express love.

The former connects to, but extends beyond, caring physical labour. Here, we are referring to an absence of cruel conditions which might otherwise make other animals’ performances of love unconvincing. An example of this can be found in how other animals are housed. Barns and coops are relatively spacious and, since there are limits to the quantity of animals that can be housed in each, they cannot become overcrowded. Instead, the player can only house up to twelve animals in larger barns and coops. Despite market incentives pushing them to continually expand and intensify production, the player is unable to replicate the cramped living conditions of contemporary animal farms. The rural idyll is built in opposition to industry and its destructive excess: although it does not reject the capitalist logics which lead to industrial animal farming, it rejects their outcomes. It appears that the wellbeing of these animals takes some precedence over pure profit. Another important example is the types of animal commodities which can be extracted from other animals. As Cole and Stewart (2014) point out in their analysis of social media farming games, idyllic representations of farms appear almost entirely devoid of violence: there are no slaughterhouses. Instead, meat often simply appears near the live animal or, in the case of Stardew Valley, is entirely absent. Farm animals are not kept for meat, but for their continued labour, made all the more acceptable since they appear to live comfortably, with a caring owner.

The second component, made convincing by the comfort and care involved in the first, appears in virtual other animals’ performances of emotional labour. Here, Stardew Valley reiterates actual discourses surrounding “ethical meat” production. As Arcari (2018: 179) points out, ethical meat producers often portray food animals ‘as relaxed, amiable, and content’ in their promotional materials: ‘their relationships with humans appear affectionate, and their environments evoke pastoral idylls and a romantic “folksy charm”’ (see also Todd, 2010). Images of affectionate animals obscure the processes in which the life and death of such animals are put to work for capital, rendering them as well-loved companions rather than means of production. Meat on store shelves then appears as the products of fulfilled lives rather than grisly deaths – that is, it appears as ethical meat. Although justificatory discourses in Stardew Valley are not put to work trying to sell actual or virtual meat, we see a similar operation occurring in-game. When other animals’ needs are met and they are given player attention, small heart-shapes appear above their heads. For their needs to be met, they must have food and shelter; to give them attention, the player simply interacts with the other animal through a button press. Chess (2015: 223) identifies this form of heart as an “emotive heart”, which signifies a non-player-character's disposition towards the player-character. The heart denotes the other animal's love for the player: Stardew Valley's animal labourers, who cannot perish except by being locked out of their dwelling at night, live long lives alongside the player, to whom they emote love while they ceaselessly produce for player benefit.

Arcari (2018: 180–181) also shows how meat producers connect images of cared for and affectionate livestock with “better meat”. Not only are these products presented as ethically produced, but better because of it. This notion appears in Stardew Valley as well: the player, in a variety of ways, can build a heart rating with their animals. This rating is shown to the player (through a menu) as a number of hearts, the maximum being five. Actions that positively affect this rating include petting (the simple form of interaction mentioned earlier), milking or shearing, and allowing the animals to graze. Feeding the animal has a direct impact on whether it produces an animal product, but consistently maximizing the positive effect of player actions on other animals will lead them to produce better quality items. Consistently milking a cow, petting it and letting it roam will eventually yield “large milk” instead of just milk, which can be used to produce higher quality cheese (or sold for more money than its regular counterpart in both its milk and cheese form). Loving/loved cows produce milk which makes for better cheese: the reward for treating cows well is economic, their emotional labour justifying player expropriation and sale of better milk and better cheese.

These “ethical” and “better meat” discourses are reiterated in Stardew Valley's “procedural rhetoric” (Bogost, 2007). They serve to naturalize other animals’ subjugation to surplus value production: since the player-character can easily make their animal labourers happy, and since their happiness improves their productive capacities, it appears as though other animals rely on humans to live healthy, happy lives. Furthermore, since their happiness leads to better milk, those lives appear to be best lived when integrated into circuits of commodity production. Not only is the player rehearsing notions of human supremacy over, and justifications for the subjugation of, other animal life, but they also participate in virtual cross-species performances which obscure supremacy and subjugation through a process of naturalization.

It might be argued that these cross-species performances emphasize the ways in which other animals are lively, emotional beings, deserving of more than the inevitable “chicken harvesting machine” (Wadiwel, 2018). Coupled with its absence of meat and slaughter, Stardew Valley seems to proffer an argument for vegetarian farming practices. However, to celebrate this is to ignore how, in our exposure to Stardew Valley's “happy animals” (Pilgrim, 2013), we are convinced that cows and chickens live happy and fulfilling lives, and we need not consider that they exist to eternally labour in the constant generation of surplus value. Though players choose to rehearse subjectivities in which other animals are arguably viewed as more than meat, they nonetheless also rehearse subjectivities which view other animals as naturally subjugated to and dominated by humans.

The affective power of virtual animal labour

While the physical labour of virtual other animals is put to work producing in-game commodities for the player, their performances of emotional labour contribute to the production of an affective game-space for the player to inhabit. A loving animal underclass justifies Stardew Valley's cruelty-free capitalism, and compels the player to engage in its circuits of production which appear to benefit the labourers caught up in its processes. The virtual farm is a contact zone for the player, who works with the computer machine, game software, and virtual animals to create images of happy cows and a fulfilling rural idyll. Put another way, games which, like Stardew Valley, are full of circuits of virtual commodity production and ecological exploitation, are themselves commodities which often rely on performances of labour from virtual animals to create desirable game-worlds and encounter value. Farming games are included in this categorisation, but often “factory building” (Coffee Stain Studios, 2021) games like Satisfactory (Coffee Stain Studios, 2019: early access) and survival games like Minecraft (Mojang Studios, 2011) and Palworld (Pocketpair, 2024) also feature cycles of production and exploitation, and are made enjoyable, in part, through the simulated performances of domesticated and wild other animals. This is, as Barua (2016) points out, "spectacular accumulation", wherein encounters with charismatic virtual commodity-animals work to sell other commodities – in this case, the game itself.

Waszkiewicz and Bakun (2020) explain that three factors, “safety”, “abundance” and “softness” (see also Cook, 2018), make cosy games feel low risk: the player-character's needs are easily met, allowing players ‘to seek the fulfillment of love and belonging needs (friendship, intimacy, family and sense of connection), esteem needs (respect, recognition and freedom) and self-actualization needs (desire to achieve one's full potential)’ (Waszkiewicz and Bakun, 2020: 226–227). “Softness”, in particular, is useful here: it describes the use of image and sound to put the player at ease. This softness can be found in the bright, inoffensive colour palette of Stardew Valley's dominant rural environments (as opposed to the drab, sterile appearance of its office and the supermarket); its pixel-art visual style, which is at once nostalgic (or “retro”) and simplistic (Cho et al., 2018); and, it can be argued, in the visualized love of other animals, which obscure their exploitation.

Waszkiewicz and Bakun (2020) argue that cosy games allow the player to fulfil a fantasy of stability and safety rather than the common fantasy of greatness fulfilled by other videogames. In other words, rather than overcoming some combination of insurmountable odds, dangerous opponents, and scarce resources to emerge a victorious hero, cosy games never really challenge the player. Instead, they evoke in the player a sense of ease and comfort. However, this fantasy of stability and safety, I argue, facilitates and compels a fantasy of greatness. It is an affective tool which comforts and calms the player as they engage in a “softened” version of capitalist accumulation and other animal exploitation and subjugation. This is not to say that all cosy games soften capitalism, but many (and especially popular ones) do. Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Nintendo, 2020), for example, is also commonly referred to as a cosy game (Morton, 2023; Waszkiewicz and Bakun, 2020). In both Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley, the player engages in growing cycles of capital accumulation, which leads them to philanthropy (and, in Animal Crossing, debt) as a means of building and saving towns. The game's cosiness eases the player into becoming a heroic conduit of capitalist exploitation; in Stardew Valley, the town mayor gives the player-character an award literally labelling them a “hero” once they have donated enough commodities to the town.

Stardew Valley's other animals, organised according to the logics of the Capitalocene, produce a “cosy” game-world that denies the destructive effects of such logics. In doing so, Stardew Valley exemplifies the connection, noted by a number of scholars (Adams, 2020; Lippit, 2000; Turkle, 2011; Wallin, 2022), between the proliferation of digital other animals and the concurrent disappearance of “real” animals: as the player engages in loving and eternal relationships with a selection of digital other animals, real other animals disappear in two ways. Firstly, the continual production of death which governs many captive other animals’ lives is itself rendered invisible, part of the “objective violence” (Žižek, 2008) that operates in the normal functioning of capitalism. Secondly, other animals are disappearing due to extinction linked to ‘habitat loss, overexploitation for economic gain, and climate change’ (Ceballos et al., 2015: 4).

Other animals’ emotional performances are important components of how the game puts the player at ease, and how it softens and obscures exploitation, compelling the player to maintain the circuits of commodity production in which other animals are trapped. Other animals’ virtual labour is mobilized to create an affective game space associated with player comfort and escape. Players desire the low-risk fantasy of greatness that Stardew Valley offers, which makes other animals’ love and the softened exploitation it produces generative of real surplus value. Stardew Valley's virtual chickens, detached from real contexts of animal agriculture, nonetheless perform labour in service of the death-producing machine which is capital.

Conclusion

Stardew Valley's farm animals perform physical and emotional labour for the player's benefit. In interspecies encounters, the player facilitates and manages other animals’ physical labour, which produces animal commodities like milk and eggs. Simultaneously, other animals’ performances of love suggest that they enjoy their exploitation – that is, they enjoy their integration into circuits of surplus value production. Rather than becoming happier as less surplus value is extracted from encounters in which they and the farmer labour, the opposite occurs: as other animals become happier, the farmer extracts more surplus value in the form of large milk or eggs. The human-player integrates other animals into cycles of production, an action for which they are rewarded both emotionally and economically. Within the procedural rhetoric, the player's organization of other animal labour appears ethical and natural, beneficial to not only the player-capitalist and human-consumers, but also to the cows and chickens who rely on the player for satisfaction of their needs.

Performances of love encourage the player to rehearse orientations towards other animal life which naturalize their subjugated position. The player chooses to subjugate other animals, to structure their lives around production which solely benefits the human player, who needs to expand commodity production beyond the capacities of their labour alone. But when cows reward the player with affection, the game is attempting to convince the player that they treat cows with respect; when sheep show love, the game attempts to convince the player that the their wool is procured within entirely ethical relationships unlike the mutton that those same animals die to produce in games like Minecraft (Mojang Studios, 2011). In other words, the game attempts to convince the player that lively other animals exist to produce commodities, and therefore that encounters which structure other animal life around commodity production are ethical. In their actions on the virtual farm, the player rehearses a series of orientations towards other animal labourers which justify their eternal subjugation.

As mentioned in the introduction, these relationships exist in various forms throughout a range of popular videogame texts. Revisiting Red Dead Redemption 2, we can observe that the player-character's horse plays a physical and emotional role in the player's journey. They transport the player-character around the game's large open-world, during which time the player bonds with their horse. These bonding mechanics make it appear as though the horse benefits from the horse-owner relationship, since they enjoy and grow to love their owner, while the player benefits from the increased stamina and health given to their horse at higher bonding levels. The horse becomes better transport at higher bonding levels, another extension of the “better meat” discourses discussed earlier (Arcari, 2018). Of course, interactions with virtual and real other animals which are compassionate and loving are preferable to those which are cruel, but this nonetheless takes their initial subjugation for granted, naturalizing it, by refusing to interrogate it. Although loving and caring encounters between player and other animals are preferable to the various forms of uncaring, violent and cruel encounters also found throughout media, the problem remains that love and care often obscure the cruelty and exploitation made necessary by the expanding scales of capitalist production. In these cases, love and care do not take the place of cruelty and exploitation; love and care produce cruelty and exploitation by naturalising human dominance and giving cruelty and violence acceptable spaces in which to occur out of view.

In other animals’ virtual performances of emotional and physical labour, the player encounters lively beings that enjoy their subjugation. Their love compels the player to choose to dominate them, rehearsing a reliance on animal agriculture which is destructive of our non-game world. Both industrial animal agriculture and climate change represent productions of death which are immanent to capitalist socioeconomic organization, and the continued use of tropes which naturalize animals as food or commodities reinforce both. Waszkiewicz and Bakun (2020: 228) connect a growing desire for cosy games, which offer fantasies of stability and safety, ‘to the increasing awareness of climate change and the global anxieties caused by political situations in both the United States and Europe of the last decades’. There is no industrial animal farm or climate crisis in Stardew Valley, but the fantasy of stability offered by the game risks reinforcing that from which it offers escape: capitalism, animal agriculture, and climate disaster.