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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

I've been playing a lot of Stardew Valley lately, glad to see it mentioned in this article. The game in combination with with a sativa vape has made me much better equipped to deal with my own stress and anxiety caused by working so much.

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Isn't Stardew Valley an anxiety creator? I haven't played it, but I'm deliberately not because I hear people talk having to plan their days to maximize the output of their crops and such. I really don't want to have a new virtual job to go with my real daytime job.

I haven't played it too but from what I've read about it, I suspect it might cause a so called Tetris Effect when the game mechanics basically invades people's though patterns.[0] It can be used as a somewhat effective "distraction" for your brain during episodes of anxiety[1] helping to overcome it. So if someone is planning their crops, they're probably just distracting themselves from anxious thoughts. Just my understanding from reading the article and different opinions of players.

Anecdotal: a friend of mine used to play some casual mobile game for quite some time (Candy Crush or something), she told me once that when she was giving birth she involuntarily started to "play" the game in her mind when the stress and pain became too strong, she said it helped her both to distant herself and to focus. :)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect

[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/mp201723

You sound like someone who has never had Tetris vision. It’s mildly frustrating. You close your eyes and your brain starts simulating whatever game you’ve played too much (in my case, dungeon crawl stone soup). But it’s not a fun simulation, it’s more so just a random imagined game state and then predicted next state, vaguely dream like.

Honestly it’s probably the same mechanism as dreaming. Just your brain training itself too hard while you’re still awake.

I've never had it from Tetris or other games, except the "falling sand game". It took a few weeks before it went away. It wasn't fun.

when i was a kid i fell asleep on a pokémon game and for a few hours after waking up lived in a world echoing with one pokémon song. sleep deprivation from staying up all night playing pokémon surely doesn’t help. toying around with the tetris effect is fun. human sensory perception is whack, even without drugs! our brain can play us scenes if we guide it a bit.

I used to play it and enjoyed maximizing revenue on my farm. My daughter does basically no farming, instead she likes to interact with the villagers and do other things the game offers. The game does not hold your hand, you are free to enjoy whatever aspects works for you.

it's what you make of it, i suppose.

there's no score, no deadlines, and no punishment for missing things in the game, so it's a very relaxing game for me. some 'days' in the game i'd get up, water my plants, and just go back to sleep because i didn't feel like doing anything.

other people naturally like to min-max, though, and the game certainly allows you to do that. there's people who'll make farms that are entirely optimized for maximum gold production; there's practically nothing to do with that much gold but seeing the numbers go up is what they enjoy.

i have played a ton of stardew, and it really is a great game to relax too, the planning and such you are talking about is so minor in terms of seriousness, that it can help teach planning and management of time. it lets you focus on what you want, the relationships you build feel real, and the reward of growing these digital plants feels good!

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