I’ve been thinking a lot about nostalgia lately and I’m not quite sure why, but I’m pretty sure it is a desire for the “good old days”. It seems that I am finally of an age (and the world is in a state) that is old enough to recall utopian past experiences that I never actually had. I recall cool summer nights staying up late (like prime time TV late) and watching shows like M*A*S*H and Little House of the Prairie with my oh-so-grown-up aunts (who would have barely been teenagers themselves at the time). And I remember us all loving the shows, knowing that something was risqué about M*A*S*H and “Hot Lips Houlihan” but not quite being sure of why it was risqué or why that woman’s lips were always so hot. And Little House on the Prairie held a special place in my heart, little girls growing up together, learning about life and love and never thinking about race, class, or gender construction in any meaningful way. I don’t know if my aunts did, but they never shared it with me. It was the 1970’s there weren’t a lot of POC on television then (at least not in shows that were age appropriate for me) and if there were they were horrible caricatures of folks from tribal cultures often with bones in their noses and always a threat.
Several months ago Netflix brought M*A*S*H into it’s streaming library and my 7 year old heart jumped with joy (and I’m probably being a little generous with the age). I carved out some Netflix binge time from my schedule, grabbed a beer and snacks, and sat down to watch. Within the first hour I had already been hit with enough racism and rape jokes to last me a good while. It must have been a fluke, right? No one in their right mind would have let a young child watch this (forgetting of course that teenagers are rarely in their right minds –just kidding—and it was the 1970s). So I took a moment to flip through the descriptions and a few minutes of a few more episodes…episode built on the notion of the Black buck—check, episode objectifying women and disparaging Koreans—check, episode suggesting Hot Lips is an officer because she slept her way to the top—check, slavery episode where the subservient woman of course wants to be enslaved and was sold into said slavery at no fault of the white man by her own people—check and check. What was I seeing and what had I seen? Not only do these depictions give us some insight into why people hold the beliefs that they do about things like “comfort women” (government supplied of course), but it also casts a revealing light on how the fact that this view of women in wartime extends to a view of women in the military in general and calls to mind the truly mind boggling rape statistics that tell us that there are reports of more than 70 members of the military being raped every day. This number is made even more horrific when we consider that we know, statistically, that 85% of rapes go unreported. When I pair these statistics with jokes of selling raffle tickets for weekend trips with “willing” female soldiers (by the “good guys” no less) it all just becomes a bit unbearable.
Fast forward a few months and I giggle every time my now 7 year old daughter talks about the “old days” and hilariously asks her grandmother if they had cars, television, or indoor plumbing when she was a child. We visit the local (a)historical museum/exhibit/park and Alisha and I fume as the local “Indians” tell our children that that the Native Americans gladly sold their land to the settlers for glass beads because they couldn’t make them themselves. I seethe and keep whispering something about burying their dead in a bed of glass beads rather than on their land. I manage to not lose my shit and get arrested for some charge or another for giving small children a historically accurate read of life on the fucking prairie. We spent a good bit of time deprogramming that shit at my house. Ironically, my kid tells me that she knew that it might not be quite right and when I asked her why she said that she could “tell by the look on [my] face”. I guess my poker face is not as good as I had once believed.
This all got my daughter more interested in the “old days” and while she was still too young to read the Little House on the Prairie books (and those books were all kinds of racially problematic) I recently decided that maybe watching the television series based on the books. I remembered those and they weren’t so bad…So I grabbed season one from the local library and prepared to relax screen time limits for the sake of short loan periods and we started to watch the show. It took her all of 2 or 3 episodes to ask the question that I don’t recall ever asking as a child. Where are all of the brown people? No Native Americans (yet) and no African Americans. Wow, we had long talks about television in the 1970s and how POC were depicted (or erased) for a long time. We talked about how things were getting better, but that there was still work to be done. Later episodes brought up questions that led to discussions of gender roles and women’s health issues, child rearing and abuse, and of course…red face. We must have been twenty something episodes into the first season when we saw our first “savage” and when he came on screen I physically recoiled. My child turned around in horror and asked “WHY does he look like that?!?”. In the 1970s NBC had seen fit to cast a white actor as a Native American “chief” and color his skin with what looked like shoe polish. And here, dear reader, I had to explain black/red/yellow face and the erasure of race to my child. We had to talk about how ignorant, horrible, and racist the practice is and then I had to honestly answer the question…”But they don’t do that anymore, right?”. And this is how the nostalgic lens through which I had viewed my childhood was shattered.
I am sure that you are wondering what this has to do with gaming at this point. (I know that I was.) All of this talk of nostalgia and the good old days had led me to playing a lot of farming simulators in a quest for the pastoral. I played several old (and very bad) versions of Harvest Moon on my 3DS before I finally just broke down and dedicated some time to installing Stardew Valley on my Mac laptop via a Wine wrapper. With Stardew Valley I could be the character that I wanted to be. I didn’t have to be a white prairie child or a noble savage. I could be a Black, natural haired, fairly androgynous (damned bikini), and female bodied character. I would farm when I wanted to, go to town and talk to folks when I wanted to, and dungeon crawl all the damned time. Stardew Valley was the Harvest Moon game that I always wanted. One where I wasn’t forced to romance a male character if I chose to be a female bodied character. One where I could wear black pants, a t-shirt, and boots everyday (just like real life!). And most importantly one where I could romance and love anyone I wanted without being judge by other characters or having my game end because I (as a woman) got married. Of course, as Patricia Hernandez points out in her Kotaku piece, Tips For Playing Stardew Valley, once you get married your spouse can get jealous if you give gifts to other characters. So, in short, polyamory is out of the question.
Stardew Valley has it’s shortcomings for me as well. All of the characters that it is possible to romance in the dating sim portion of the game look extremely young. This might not be a problem for some folks, but really they just look young enough to be my children to me so I haven’t married in my game yet. If you have the know how (and a Windows PC) you can install mods that will make the characters appear older (and more controversially one to make the bi-racial character appear white). And while this may seem to be a small thing, if I were going to play a dating sim I would want to at least “date” someone who would be appealing to me in real life, so fresh faced teenagers are kind of out of the question. To be perfectly honest, without mods, the dating sim/friendship portion of the game just stresses me out way too much. You have to remember to give people 2 gifts (that they like and everyone likes and hates different things) within a 7 day period or the count resets. For me that is just a little too much work when I have crops and livestock to tend and monsters to destroy while I am mining caves around town and rebuilding the community center to make sure that WalMart (aka Joja Mart) will take over.
After spending so much time playing this game (almost 50 hours at the time that I am writing this) while watching Little House on the Prairie I am almost expecting hail to come in and destroy all of my crops, expecting my (non-existent) wife to die in childbirth, or a noble “savage” to come along for me to save (which I probably wouldn’t be able to do because my character is neither white nor male bodied). But for now I will continue to farm my land and dig for ore in an attempt to make Stardew Valley and my little farm a better place. And 30 years from now I will be telling small children how perfect this game was and how none of it’s current shortcomings actually existed and I will invite them to sit down with me and play a spell…
