What Stardew Valley Taught Me About My OCD

Farming sims have been one of my favorite video game genres ever since I was a kid. It started with Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town in fifth grade. Earlier that year, I’d had a nightmare that led me to develop a fear of cows (it’s a long story), and Harvest Moon, weirdly enough, helped me get over my fear. I’ve loved cows, and farming sims, ever since.

I’ve been playing a lot of Stardew Valley again lately. I logged well over 100 hours, maybe 150, when my fiancé and I first bought it for the Xbox One. Having exhausted most of the game’s novelty by that point, I took a months-long break and finally came back to it late this summer. I’d decided to leave my job and attempt a career in freelance writing, so I found myself with a lot of extra time on my hands. With my career trajectory up in the air, Stardew Valley offered consistency and comfort.

My approach to farming sims…might seem unusual to some people. This was something I noticed while watching my fiancé play Stardew Valley alongside me. His method was very off-the-cuff and disorganized, prioritizing whatever he felt like doing at that moment, and he often forgot to water crops or tend to his animals. He also became obsessed with coffee production and made a killing off of it. On the other hand, I developed a daily schedule that I’d follow to the T—water/harvest crops, tend to animals, talk/give gifts to my twelve boyfriends and girlfriends—and deal with other tasks I was interested in, like mining, once those were done. All of my animals were fenced in, all of my crops were in 3×3 plots, and all of my buildings were in locations that made sense for my daily routine. We’d sometimes playfully bicker because I kept telling him how to organize crops or corral animals to save time. In return, he’d remind me that crafting equipment for the farm was actually a thing I could do, unlike in Harvest Moon, hence why I frequently forgot about crafting.

Watching my fiancé play in a way so differently from what I was used to was both fascinating and uncomfortable. In fairness, he’d never played a farming sim before, and I was drawing from years of experience playing Harvest Moon, so we were bound to have different strategies. What mattered was that we were both having fun. Even still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was playing…wrong. With every tip or snarky suggestion, I was actively trying to control how he played the game, and I didn’t even realize what I was doing until he called me out.

I was officially diagnosed with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder six years ago, but its symptoms have followed me since the age of three. OCD is characterized by “obsessions,” intrusive thoughts about something that create anxiety (bacteria, for example), and “compulsions,” the coping mechanisms one develops to quell anxiety or make those thoughts go away (such as washing one’s hands). Growing up with those symptoms made it very difficult for me to imagine another way of thinking and experiencing the world.

When I was a child, playing Harvest Moon, I didn’t think twice about how odd it was that doing the exact same things every single (in-game) day for years was something I found fun rather than monotonous. There were times when I got bored with my “routine,” sure—but I didn’t change it. That possibility never occurred to me. I’d be more likely to put the game down for a while and come back to it months later than change how I experienced it in the moment. I kept going back for years. The idea of routine, a consistent way of interacting with the game, itself a vacuum that I could easily predict and control, was comforting. Doing the same thing every single day meant that I knew what to expect and didn’t have to worry about anything. It was the ideal escape from reality, where anything could go wrong at any moment and I was on frequent guard against intrusive thoughts and anxiety.

Stardew Valley brought a lot of new concepts to the farming sim genre, but on the whole, it operates very similarly to the Harvest Moon games I was used to. The familiarity and comfort of routine was still there, and perhaps even better, the majority of surprises in Stardew were pleasant ones; I might not have been able to predict or control them, but ultimately they still benefited me. In Stardew Valley, it’s easy to make money, friends, and memories. Its world is controlled by the game’s code and is meant to be manipulated to a certain extent by the player. It is, essentially, the obsessive-compulsive’s dream.

Watching my fiancé play Stardew meant I was forced to experience the game in a different way, and that break from routine made me anxious. My attempts to control how he played were less to do with him and more to do with maintaining the compulsions I had come to associate with farming sims. Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley were relaxing and fun for me because I had turned them into a coping mechanism for the unpredictability of real life, and those compulsions were being interrupted by my fiancé’s way of playing.

Fortunately, there’s a lot of good that can be found in bonding over games. As my fiancé and I continued to play, I gradually took a few pages out of his book. I became more lax about my “routine” and started to spend more time exploring what Stardew Valley had to offer. I pursued side quests for the sake of fun rather than predictability. I still found the “routine” method effective for making money, but I wasn’t bound to it like I had been in the past. I was playing the way I wanted to, rather than the way I felt I had to.

Coming back to Stardew Valley again, with less structure in my life than when I first played it, I found that same comfort of familiarity and stability that I used to love in farming sims. But I’m not beholden to compulsively repeat my gameplay anymore. It’s true that I find farming sims most enjoyable when I have control over what happens in the game, but here’s the thing: I have control over myself to do whatever I want to do, with or without structure. Leaving a stable job that was making me unhappy in favor of writing full-time is the biggest life shake-up I’ve ever chosen on my own, but also one of the most liberating. I’ll never be rid of my OCD fully, and I’ve accepted that. But that doesn’t mean it has to control my life. I’ve got cows for that.