a small world, entirely mine

on farming games, capitalism, and the very reasonable need to escape into a world where effort actually pays off

If this blog were a houseplant, it would have been dead and composted and the pot repurposed by now. And yet. I have returned, slightly weathered, with approximately four months of thoughts I never wrote down and a very strong feeling that I should have been. Consider this my watering can moment. We’re bringing it back.

And what better way to return than to talk about the thing that has been keeping me company in my absence. The thing I come home to after long days of being a functional adult in society. The thing that has, frankly, been more consistent than this blog.

My games.

Specifically: why I cannot stop playing farming sims at 10pm on a Monday like a person who has completely lost the plot, and what I think that actually says about all of us.

Right now, I am deep in both Little Known Galaxy and Moonstone Island simultaneously. Which is, again, a very me thing to do. Both are cozy games, part of a genre that has absolutely exploded since Stardew Valley made the whole world want to tend a digital field. You build a small life from scratch. Crops, friendships, a little home you make cuter over time. The loop is deeply, unapologetically repetitive. Some evenings I spend an hour doing the same task cycle and come back the next day and do it again with the same willingness.

Like clockwork. Like someone is cutting me a cheque.

No one is cutting me a cheque. I am, in fact, the one spending money on these games.

And yet. Here I am. Every evening.

so what is it actually
The easy answer is escapism, and it’s not wrong. But I think it stops short of the real thing. Because when I actually look at what these games give me, what keeps pulling me back past the point of reason: it isn’t just escape.

It’s control.

In these cozy games, I decide who I befriend, what I plant, when I sleep. I choose a person to pursue and they like me back, reliably, because the game is written that way. There is no ambiguity. Everyone in these worlds is, at the most foundational level, coded to receive you. The relationships resolve. The crops grow. The effort compounds into something you can actually see and hold.

I can run a farm and have it actually turn a profit. I live off it. I build something and it sustains me. In a real city, a real metropolis where rent is a personality trait and land ownership is a fantasy, that particular dream is so far out of reach it’s almost funny. So we build it in pixels. We tend our little digital plots and feel, genuinely, the satisfaction of enough.

I don’t think that’s sad. I think that’s very human.

the illusion of escapism
What gets me is this: Stardew Valley, Little Known Galaxy, Moonstone Island; all of these games are beloved because they offer a slower, gentler life. Peace. No pressure. You’re just a little guy, living simply.

And we play them like we have a KPI to hit by Friday.

Seasonal deadlines. Friendship milestones. Completion percentages. I have, in full transparency, felt genuine stress about missing a festival in Stardew because I did not manage my in-game week efficiently enough. There is a part of my brain that, when handed a world with no real stakes and told to relax, immediately goes: okay but what are the objectives and how quickly can we complete them.

It’s a little bleak! It’s also a little funny. We are so fluent in the language of output that we pack it with us into our leisure. Our hobbies. Our games literally designed around the concept of slowing down. We grind for fun. We optimise rest.

I don’t know if that’s a damning critique of modern working life or just a quirk of how brains trained on productivity function. Probably both.

why I keep going back anyway
Here is the thing though. Even the small, coded, consequence-free kind of control, it does something real for you. Most of life is things arriving at you. Timelines you didn’t set. Outcomes you couldn’t fully influence. A general low hum of variables you cannot touch.

And then you come home, and there is this little world, and in it you are the axis everything turns on. The seasons move because you showed up. The farm grows because you tended it. The person you chose chose you back, every time, no asterisk.

That’s not nothing. That’s not a waste of an evening.

The genre keeps growing because the need it fills is real, somewhere to practice having enough, to rehearse a life that fits, to feel the uncomplicated satisfaction of something working out.

It is a very small world. It is entirely mine.