Stardew Valley is a life simulation video game in which the player moves to a small rural community to work on their grandfather's old farm. The game was created by Eric Barone (known online as ConcernedApe) and originally released for PC via Steam on February 26, 2016. It has since released on many different platforms and sold over 10 million copies.
Stardew Valley has a few overarching themes:
We aim to answer the following questions through our analysis of the game's text:
How we will analyze the text of Stardew Valley:
On our website we have featured details about the text corpora we woked with, our methodology for conducting our analysis, and some visualizations of our findings. Enjoy!
In regards to our original goals for this project, our intent on analyzing the central themes of Stardew Valley (those of nature and community) largely fell by the wayside. We may not have ended up analyzing those aspects of the game, but we did look at how emotionally positive or negative the game's text was overall. We found that the game has a largely positive outlook. Anyone who has played Stardew Valley and has gotten to know its characters knows that the game has some dark moments and many characters deal with serious personal issues like depression or the loss of a loved one. However, many of them are making an effort to work through their issues and make the best out of their situations.
The rest of our findings were largely quantitative rather than qualitative. We networked each of the characters to the locations that they appear throughout the game. By doing this, we found out which locations are visited by the most characters and which characters appear in the most locations. We also developed a graph showing the pecentage of lines of dialogue in the game that are spoken by each character. The character with the most lines had 5.159 percent of them, and the character with the least lines had 0.02 percent of them.
While our results may not be what we were originally intending to look for, they were at least interesting for those who have played Stardew Valley and allowed us to make some fun inferences about our findings. If we had more time, we would have liked to look at the dialogue and word usage more closely to identify recurring themes. We would have also liked to network the connections of the characters to eachother, instead of just to the locations they appear in. Perhaps this project could be picked up by another group in a future DIGIT class who can analyze the game even further than we did.
