Playing Stardew Valley has affected me in ways it’s difficult to describe. For about six months, I have been living a double life as a farmer-social entrepreneur character in Pelican Town and a human being/parent/employee at some Joja Cola-like firm in a real 21st century depressing city.

As everyone else in this urban-competitive environment, I have been searching for the holy grail of “simple life”. But with no talent or tools or even a small piece of land where I could see life sprout from, I turned to Stardew Valley in hopes of finding some 8-bit peace of mind. For those who are not familiar with the game, it is basically about giving up a shitty life of late-hour pointless jobs and restarting everything from scratch in an abandoned farm that your late grandfather left for you. (Well, in this case I consider that the player is lucky enough to have had a grandpa and inherit a property, so all that complaining about working hard at some greedy company etc seems another millennial whining and oh my God, how I’d love to have abuelo back with some candy for me and maybe a whole farm too.)

Anyway, the whole scenario is clearly much better than real life since you are the natural owner of some property you didn’t have to sweat your ass off to pay.

But that doesn’t mean there’s no hard work ahead. Although I was being able to restart life in much better conditions than those when I was 18, crops would not grow by themselves, milk would not just show up in the fridge, and obviously money was in no way going to appear from nowhere in my Stardew-money account for me to have the means to make my grocery shopping at Pierre’s.

So the FIRST LESSON Stardew Valley taught me was the one Lou Reed tried to teach us all a long time ago, but we didn’t learn. “You’re going to reap just what you sow”, isn’t it true? Easier said than done... In a world where credit cards let you reap before sowing, it is not always easy to understand where does subsistence come from. Planning crops according to seasons was just the first step: no, you can’t plant pumpkins during summer! No, oranges are not going to appear in fall! And absolutely NO, there are no crops at all in winter!!! (Unless you have a greenhouse, in which case you will have already managed to understand those teachings from nature and Lou Reed.)

Besides farming, I had to do all the mining, foraging and crafting in order to have anything more than the five tools they gave me when I first started the game.

The SECOND LESSON Stardew Valley taught me was about cooking. In the game, you can’t just order food, there’s absolutely no possibility that someone will show up at your door holding a bag of anything more tasty than a microwaved potato (well, actually that can happen once in a while, but not whenever you feel hungry); so you have to cook.

At first I didn’t realize that the art of putting together two or more ingredients in the game was making me more prone to repeat it in my off-game existence. But it did. Soon I was leaving behind a long period of no cooking due to depression and baking cupcakes for my family. Making crisp, delicious chicken for dinner turned into a pleasure again, and what about some fancy barbecue? I barbecued vegetables, barbecued not the regular everyday vegetables but some really odd ones (I mean, I barbecued okra, for Christ’s sake). In my mind, I guess I was unlocking new recipes in real life. That wouldn’t make me a well-succeeded outlander that happened to also be the heiress of Grandpa Farmer, but at least dinner became a little more decent in my home.

After some months of sowing, reaping and making mayo out of every egg that my hens and ducks have laid on the farm (we’re talking about Jesus farm here, ok, that is the name I gave my property), it occurred to me that I was doing well financially, I was making culinary progress at home and had a good amount of recipes in the game, and that was all great, but my life as a whole in Stardew Valley was starting to look as dreary as its off-game counterpart. The problem appeared to be I wasn’t a SOCIAL success in the game, and the situation would obviously have to change at some point. And that point was about to be reached.

After months of hard play, I had amassed only a few ‘hearts’: they would appear in my social profile as people recognized me as a good, friendly neighbor that gave them high-quality food and gems and cloth and advice and stuff. But these guys were not easy to conquer. You had to know their personality: you can’t offer a delicious Pink Cake to the tree-hugger who lives in a cottage by the river; the blacksmith is a sarcastic jerk, but when I had the chance to tell him that right in the face I was afraid that my heart-rate would drop or, worse, that I would become a declared enemy of a blacksmith… Just imagine being chased down by the only guy in town who knows how to craft a scythe and upgrade an axe.

So I started snooping the lives of those people in Pelican Town in order to know them better. I began to visit them more and more often, looking for clues that would help me to fill all those empty hearts. I found out some pretty disturbing information: the lovely old lady who liked to send me recipes from time to time had lost a daughter (I hope that’s not a spoiler, but no one can spoil the hardness of life itself, right?). And that daughter happened to be the mother of another NPC and… could that explain the bitterness of George?

Well. You just start knowing things about people. That’s precisely what I have been running away from in my real life; I don’t want to know people, I always felt uncomfortable meeting new people or dealing with their problems, maybe because I thought I already had a sufficiently large collection for myself. But who said life is about doing just what you want?

So the absence of hearts in my heart-board in Stardew Valley lead me to recognize that I was lacking some hearts in real life too.

And that was the THIRD LESSON I learned while playing Stardew Valley.