I’ve played so many ‘farming sims’ over the years that it’s transitioned from a hobby to an obsession. My Steam wishlist is overflowing with upcoming titles that might be my next opportunity to live a virtual bucolic life filled with fruit trees and cute animals. I consider a cosy night on the couch playing Stardew Valley on the Switch to be basically heaven on earth.
I’ve decided to turn my obsession into a series of feature articles and reviews. Rather than playing alone, I would like to inflict this special interest on a wider audience. I am setting myself up for a future where I can spend all night gallivanting around imaginary farms while exclaiming, ‘I’m working!’
You would think that somebody who has played as many farming sims as I have would be able to define them, but as I’ve embarked on this project, I’ve realised that task is not as straight forward as it sounds. Wikipedia describes a farming sim as ‘a subgenre of life simulation games which fuse social simulation, dating sim, and farm simulation elements’. The farming elements are third on this list, with the emphasis being placed on the interactions with and between NPCs. Based on this definition, the game series that is literally called Farming Simulator wouldn’t classify.
I’m not sure I agree with this definition. Perhaps it’s due to my personal biases: I don’t play farming sims for the dating elements, and definitely don’t prioritise those over harvesting crops. But then, the crops aren’t the most important part of these games for me either. For me, the appeal of a good farming sim is the perfect balance of having a list of tasks I need to achieve but the freedom to pursue them however I’d like. Amanda Tien refers to this as ‘focused relaxation’, and highlights Stardew Valley as one of the best examples in this area.
Stardew Valley is such an important entry into the farming sim genre that articles will now refer to games as ‘the best farming sim since Stardew Valley’ or as ‘a derivative Stardew Valley clone’. But Stardew Valley wasn’t a unique creation; the developer, Eric Barone—who originally made the game as a way to bolster his resume and practice programming in C#—chose to make a farming sim because he wanted to relive his nostalgia for classic games in the Harvest Moon (or Story of Seasons) franchise.
The first Harvest Moon game was released in Japan in 1996, followed by North America in 1997 and Europe in 1998—twenty years before Stardew Valley. Harvest Moon is the blueprint that led to the farming sims I love today, but I never played those games when I was growing up; I was more of a PlayStation girly than a Nintendo one.
My first exposure to gamified farming wasn’t until 2009, when Zynga’s FarmVille took over Facebook. FarmVille was based on other Facebook games like Happy Farm—which was extremely popular in China and Taiwan, and that was also heavily inspired by Harvest Moon. But despite sharing a lineage with Stardew Valley and having ‘farm’ in its name, is FarmVille a farming sim?
After its launch, FarmVille quickly became the most popular game on Facebook, and held that positon for two years. At its peak, the game had 83.76 million monthly active users. Its game loop required users to log in regularly to avoid their crops withering and to ask their friends for help them collect livestock or fruit trees. When I was sixteen years old, everyone I knew was begging each other for cherry trees and chickens, so those who weren’t playing FarmVille to start with were soon jumping on the bandwagon.
FarmVille’s approach was incredibly good for Facebook: it encouraged people to log onto the platform every day at a time when social networking wasn’t a daily staple to the extent that it is now. The game deliberately leaned into the ‘checklist’ element of the farming sim. Jon Tien, former Zynga director of product, said that ‘checking things off your list is viscerally satisfying, and playing FarmVille was a way for people to lean into that.”
So FarmVille had the ‘focused’ element of farming sims but, in my opinion, it lacked the ‘relaxation’ component. After school I would log on and collect my crops (and my dopamine), but there was an unshakeable sense that this game was a chore. Rather than being game you could play to decompress after a day of working, as your farm expanded, it started to feel like a second job.
Although I don’t consider FarmVille a farming sim, it did have an influence on the genre. Yasuhiro Wada—the creator of the original Harvest Moon games—believes FarmVille helped with the development of future Story of Seasons games because it expanded the market of people who were interested in recreationally tending to a virtual farm. Games like FarmVille helped farm-themed games evolve from a niche interest into a popular format.
Although farming sims are becoming more popular, it can still be difficult to agree on which games classify as a farming sim—and, just as importantly, which games don’t. I know genres can be complicated and, honestly, pretty arbitrary, but I still consider this to be an interesting thought exercise. Is Animal Crossing: New Horizons a farming sim? What about Minecraft? How does the game experience and target audience for titles like these compare to something like Stardew Valley? What are the mechanics, narrative elements, and quality of life features a farming sim needs to satisfactorily create an experience of focused relaxation for its players?
These are the questions that have inspired this project, and my ongoing obsession with the genre. So, with that, it’s time to pick up my plough and get to work.
