A post by Christopher Bartel

When children play with toys, imagination is put to a distinctive and familiar use, which we might call projective imagining. This is a use of imagination that adults don’t have many opportunities to employ. However, a recent trend in video gaming offers one. Here is an example.

Stardew Valley is a video game released in 2016. Gamers describe it as a farming simulator. In the game, the player inherits an old farm from their grandfather. The farm has fallen into poor shape. The player’s job is to make the farm profitable again, which would make the ghost of their grandfather very proud. The player can also explore the nearby village, interact with the villagers, and develop relationships with the villagers by giving them gifts and doing favors for them. While the primary activity of the game is caring for the farm—tilling the soil, planting crops, harvesting them—a significant portion of the player’s time can be taken up by developing relationships with the villagers. Players can date some characters, marry them, and have children. The game is as much a soap opera as it is a farming simulator.

There is no point where the game ends. There are lots of missions one can complete in the game—there are upgrades players can make to their homes, favors to complete for the villagers, and places to explore. There comes a point where the player has done everything that the game can do. And yet, the player doesn’t have to stop there. Players can just go on planting crops and enjoying a quiet life with their virtual families for as long as they wish. Moreover, even though there are things that the player can achieve in the game, none of the achievements are really necessary. The player can ignore all of the game’s quests and just do whatever they want for as long as they want.

My daughter and I are avid fans of the game. Playing on a multiplayer mode, we have a farm that we jointly take care of. Our farm is very profitable and we have befriended many of the villagers. We pretend that our characters—who she has named Jacky Boy and Nugget—are brother-and-sister. We do silly sibling things in the game, like chase each other, play pranks on each other, and compete over who can finish some menial task the fastest.

Games like Stardew Valley are interesting for a number of reasons. In my forthcoming book, Aesthetics and Video Games (Bloomsbury), I argue that games like Stardew Valley should be understood as “digital dollhouses”. Much of the literature on games generally tends to focus on the competitive aspects of games (e.g. Nguyen 2020, Suits 2014); while the literature on video games often focuses either on games as competitions (e.g. Juul 2005 and 2013, Kirkpatrick 2011) or as works of interactive fiction (e.g. Murray 1997, Ryan 2006, Tavinor 2009, Wolf 2001). Certainly, video games can be both of these; but they can also be mere toys, sophisticated virtual dollhouses where gamers play with digital dolls.

Here, I want to highlight how games like Stardew Valley provide adults with opportunities for projective imagining. Video games are like passive forms of fiction—films, novels, comic books—in that they require players to imagine a fictional world—let’s call this constructive imagining. With constructive imagining, the user takes on board imaginings that are prescribed by a work of fiction. Of course, no work of fiction is fully complete, so the user will need to imaginatively fill in some details. Nonetheless, it is the work that prompts the user to imaginatively construct a fictional world. Grant Tavinor (2009) has convincingly demonstrated how Walton’s (1990) account of fiction—where works of art function as props in a game of make-believe—can be applied to video games. Video games prompt players to imagine characters, scenarios, and actions; and players respond by constructively imagining the fictional world of the game.

Projective imagining is different in that the imagined fictional world is the user’s own creation, which is projected onto the prop. The prop effectively serves as a tool to aid the user in creating their own fictional world. In our game of Stardew Valley, my daughter and I imagine that our characters are siblings. Their sibling relationship is not part of the video game itself—that is, we were not prompted by the game itself to imagine that our characters are siblings—rather it is something that we imagine over-and-above what the game represents. And it is not just that we are filling out details of the game’s fictional world that are underspecified. It is that we are creating a fictional world of our own (joint) imagination and are projecting that onto the game.

In this respect, these sort of video games are a lot like toys—they are non-competitive and interactive props designed for make-believe. (In fact, I suspect that video games might better fit the kind of pretense that Walton had in mind, when compared to other forms of fiction. Walton’s account treats children’s games as the model of what make-believe can do. When children engage in a game where they imagine that tree stumps are bears [1990: 37], they are engaged in projective imagining where the fictional world that they imagine is a product of their own creation. By contrast, passive forms of fiction offer no opportunity to actively influence the imagined fictional world [see Walton 1978].)

The link to toys may make dollhouse video games seem not very special. They don’t engage our imagination in a way that is unique or even unusual. Instead, this form of engagement is a familiar fixture from childhood. What is perhaps interesting about these video games is that they allow adults to engage in projective imagining again. Adults aren’t supposed to play with toys. Adults are supposed to be serious, productive members of society. They become anxious if they feel like they are wasting their time. You cannot simply hand an adult a toy and say, “have fun”. The anxiety about being productive prevents adults (normally) from enjoying toy-play. But, you can trick an adult into playing with toys, so long as you can fool them into thinking that they are being productive. This is what video games can do. Dollhouse games can trick adults into enjoying projective imagining again—and enjoying the childish pleasure of creating our own imaginative worlds—by making it seem like we are achieving or producing something. Stardew Valley does this by giving the player little tasks to complete and trophies to earn. These make it feel like we are being productive. Video games give back to adults the opportunity to engage in a form of imagination that we are encouraged to set aside, one that brought us immense joy as children.

References

Juul, Jesper (2005). Half-Real. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Juul, Jesper (2013). The Art of Failure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Kirkpatrick, Graeme (2011). Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game. New York: Manchester University Press.

Murray, Janet (1997). Hamlet on the Holodeck. New York: The Free Press.

Nguyen, C. Thi (2020). Games: The Art of Agency. New York: Oxford University Press.

Ryan, Marie-Laure (2006). Avatars of Story. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Suits, Bernard (2014). The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia, 3rd ed. Peterborough: Broadview Press.

Tavinor, Grant (2009). The Art of Videogames. London, Routledge.

Walton, Kendall (1978). “How Remote are Fictional Worlds from the Real World?” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 37: 11-23.

Walton, Kendall (1990). Mimesis as Make-Believe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wolf, Mark, ed. (2001). The Medium of the Video Game. Austin: University of Texas Press.