Sustainable Play in Video Games: A Case Study of Stardew Valley

Sammanfattning

Research on video games and sustainability has predominantly focused on game design — examining how serious games, gamification, and narrative design can transmit ecological knowledge or shape sustainability-related behaviour. This design-centred approach, however, treats sustainability as a property to be embedded in the game system and received by players, leaving a theoretical blind spot: it cannot explain why, in games without any explicit sustainability-education intent, players nonetheless develop ecological awareness, behavioural change, and lasting community attachment through sustained play. This study proposes that play behaviour itself — not merely game design — can serve as a generative practice of sustainable value, and develops the concept of ‘sustainable play’ to articulate this possibility. Drawing on Stardew Valley and its player community as a case study, the research adopts an interpretivist qualitative method that combines netnography of r/StardewValley and Xiaohongshu with semi-structured interviews of eleven long-term players. Through thematic analysis, five core themes were identified: ecological meaning-making, behavioural spillover, place attachment, social connection, and community cohesion. The findings reveal that play generates sustainable value along two parallel but distinct pathways. At the individual level, players translate in-game engagement with farming, seasonal rhythms, and resource cycles into ecological awareness and concrete real-life practices such as gardening, slower consumption, and renewed attention to nature. At the community level, sustained play and interaction transform the digital community into a third place that produces belonging, emotional support, and both bridging and bonding forms of social capital. Together, these two pathways constitute sustainable play: a mode of play in which playing behaviour, while remaining non-instrumental, continuously generates value at both the individual and the community level. This study contributes to video game research by shifting analytical attention from game design to play as practice, and to sustainability research by extending its conceptual reach to a domain — video gaming — long excluded from sustainability discourse. It argues that play, when sustained and embedded in community, is not merely a transient form of entertainment but a practice through which ecological meaning and social relations are continuously produced.