The first thing I read this morning was a lifestyle headline about how humans simply aren’t “built” for monogamy. The second thing I read was Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone toying with the idea of introducing adultery and, by extension, divorces to cosy life sim Stardew Valley. If the third thing I read this morning is, for example, a bus advert for Paramount show Caught in the Act, I will interpret this as the universe granting permission to jump into a Portaloo with the next person who waggles their eyebrows at me.
“In a sandbox game, you should be able to do wicked things and then face the consequences,” Barone told Game Informer (paywall), as passed along by Gamesradar. This is despite his being against two-timing (and presumably three-timing, four-timing, etc ad infinitum) “on a moral level”. Tell that to your stinking home-wrecking fans, Barone.
Demand for affairs and associated marital collapse in Stardew Valley spiked in February, when speculation arose that the forthcoming Stardew Valley 1.7 update would allow players to date two married characters, Demetrius and Robin. I’d have thought a throuple was in the offing, but I’m not particularly versed in the love lives of Stardew Valley’s NPCs; players on Reddit are fixated on the idea of shagging one of them and thereby, breaking the two up.
Speaking to GI, Barone mused aloud about the prospect of torpedoing an NPC marriage. “I wouldn’t just make everyone be totally chill about it,” he said. “Everyone would hate you. It would cause a lot of chaos and disaster and suffering, and people would be angry, and you would ruin the family.”
“I would be open to doing something like that,” he went on, “but I wouldn’t baby people about it. There would be very serious consequences.”
So what’s stopping him? Something something escapism something. “Part of me is like, ‘Well, maybe this is just too real. Maybe Stardew Valley is supposed to be, to some degree, an escape from those kinds of things. It’s too realistic, you know?”
I consider that everybody involved with this sordid business lacks ambition. If it were me, I’d be introducing a sex katamari mechanic that allowed me to roll all the game’s NPCs and, indeed, animals and inanimate objects into a prodigious, pulsating polycule. Which videogame character or characters would you love to free from the shackles of obsolete religious reproductive frameworks? We’re not “built” for it, you know.
