Summary: This report is an ethnographic study of the user behavior in the game Stardew Valley. Stardew Valley is a farming simulator with a slice of life and social aspects, like Sims or Animal Crossing, created by a single developer.
Research Question: What factors have influenced the Stardew Valley community to be so wholesome?
Objectives for this exploratory ethnographic study included:
Research: Our team chose the Stardew Valley Official Discord server as our fieldwork. Each member of our team devoted a minimum of 12 hours for observation and analyzed interactions using jottings and fieldnotes. Aside from that we asked participants study questions about why they are interested in Stardew Valley, lessons they learned from the game, how is the gameplay, social aspects of the game, and the interactions they made in the Stardew Valley official Discord. It helped us discover our cohering metaphor “Stardew Valley is a community garden”. A big reason why the community is wholesome is that Stardew Valley players help and support each other to achieve goals in the game. Result: Our ethnographic study and analysis led us to an understanding of how Stardew Valley users create their culture and define community. Players are drawn to the game to unwind, relax, and take a break from the pressures of life. Players find the game relaxing because it is not competitive, players play at their own pace and there is not a “right” way to play. Players will sometimes seek help on online forums, mainly the official Discord server for Stardew Valley. These factors together have resulted in the Stardew Valley community being wholesome.
My Role: Observer, Interviewer, Researcher, Designer
Tools: Miro, Discord, Adobe InDesign
Application approach: Virtual Ethnography
Timeline: 8 weeks (October to November 2021)
Goals:
Challenges:
Ethnography explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject of the study. In our virtual ethnography, myself and three other students chose to observe the Stardew Valley Discord server in search of an answer to our research question. Over the course of 8 weeks, we observed hundreds of interactions between people all over the world, and conducted 4 interviews to gain more in-depth data and an overall better understanding of our field.
Each team was responsible for each member contributing at least 12 hours minimum of observation in the field of our choosing. As previously mentioned, our team decided on the Stardew Valley Discord server. Before we even chose Stardew, we had several workshops in class to help us narrow down on a field and a research question. Around the 3rd/4th week, we settled on Stardew and shortly after, we came up with our first research question: "How have the interactions you have made within Stardew Valley affected your interactions in your real life and what meaning does it hold in your day-to-day decisions?" Second thing we needed is consent from the gatekeepers (which was easily obtained thank goodness). By establishing our research question, it better helped us narrow down our search on quality interactions in the server. I spent a majority of my time in the #seasoned-farmers channel and an hour or two in #new-farmers when the other channel was slow. I decided this was a good place for me considering I have around 450 hours in the game (collectively from my time on my switch and PC). This allowed me to view spoilers without any risk of ruining the game for myself. It also was easier to understand the language since I have spent so much time with the game. When it came to meeting my 12 hour minimum, I spaced it out over 5 different sessions all at varying length, I wanted to get a good range of people so I made sure I observed at different times of the day. During the observation period, I noticed several people that I wanted to reach out to for interviews with my team. Once interviews were all said and done, and while we were working on our matrix, we decided to change the research question. This was a unanimous decision since we felt that the current question did not represent the information we acquired from our interviews. So after a 1 hour meeting, we settled on this as our final iteration of the research question: "What factors have influenced the Stardew Valley community to be so wholesome?"
After several weeks into the observation, we started noticing familiar faces in the server and then we began to reach out. Nikki and I did a lot of the recruiting for the team and I had nowhere near as much success as she did. A couple issues I personally ran into was that some of the people I reached out to were not 18. This was a problem because in order for us to begin the interview process, they would need to sign a consent form which required them to be 18+. Majority of the interviewee's were recruited by Nikki with one being recruited by Rocio. We ultimately decided to have it so that whoever recruited would be the facilitator of the interview. However, when it came to very specific questions or whenever the interviewees mentioned something that Nikki or Rocio didn't understand, I stepped in to facilitate and break down the information so that they would understand it better.
I noticed that with each interview, the person being interviewed opened up to discussion a lot quicker than interviews I have moderated/facilitated in the past. I can only assume this was because that all of these people had such a deeply rooted passion and affinity regarding Stardew and their community. I personally gained a lot from these interviews, I learned that they all had different emotional connections to different characters and aspects of the game. I learned about their struggles that they had and how Stardew and the community has helped them overcome them.
After completing our observations and interviews, we needed to compile our findings and notes into a conceptually ordered matrix. This is where we put similar data together and going through them to identify patterns that were seen. This matrix ultimately led to us restructuring our research question. When it came to our meeting, we all joined on Discord and compiled our journals and jottings onto our Miro board. The photo showed below is just a small section of our final matrix. There were at least 7 more columns and 10 more rows that covered our journals. I assisted in compiling the research for several of the interviewees so that it could be easily digested. After having this matrix completed, it made answering our research question a lot easier, we noticed a lot of reoccurring points being made and a lot of patterns between everyone's rows. When this was in the final stages of completion, we were led to creating our cohering metaphor being that "The Stardew Valley community is a community garden" and this helped us summarize our research.
Stardew Valley is one of my favorite games, and the community is one of the most wholesome and helpful communities I have ever observed. The game attracts a lot of people from all over and who come from different backgrounds. However, in this server they all share a love for Stardew and just that seems to bond everyone.
We learned that Stardew didn't really affect their daily life which resulted in us changing our research question. Through our entire research process, I personally found that you can't ever have a final iteration of a research question.
If you like what you see and want to work together, get in touch!
ianoliverux@gmail.com
