Winter and Death in Harvest Moon

It's early in the morning and I’m standing in the graveyard. The pastor solemnly reassures me that they had a good life, and it was a happy ending. I turn my Game Boy Advance off in horror and run to the family computer. Surely I must have done something wrong, and there was a way to avoid this. But soon I learned that death was an inevitability for all living things – including my beloved farm animals in Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town.

Harvest Moon was inspired by creator Yasuhiro Wada’s experience of growing up in the countryside, moving to Tokyo in the pursuit of excitement, and ending up desperately missing his rural home. I never had a rural home to miss – I was a child of the suburbs. But I was drawn to sentimental pastoral themes and bucolic imagery. The repetitive rhythms and chores of farming life sim games are a comfort. I’m clearly not alone. From the Harvest Moon series (or Story of Seasons as it is now known) to the indie revival of the genre led by the wild success of Stardew Valley, millions of hours have been spent watering digital crops, milking cows, and charming villagers with questionable gifts. 

These representations are of course entirely fantasy. They promise a return to a kind of country life that does not exist and never did. Marie Antoinette famously had a French peasant village built to enjoy an idealised pastoral aesthetic separate from the labour and financial hardship. Though I am not saying these digital facsimiles are as egregious, I am just as guilty of relishing a rural idyll aesthetic detached from any real-world implications. To try and translate farm labour into a comforting video game requires an overwhelming use of artistic licence and filing down of the sharp corners of reality. As time has gone on, what little friction these games had has been further whittled away, leaving an unsettling smoothness.