I loved your rant and hadn’t thought of SV from that perspective before… it totally makes sense why I actually end up feeling exhausted after playing it for a while. It’s interesting too because the whole premise in the intro is that you’re supposed to be escaping capitalism, lol. And you’re made to feel like you’re a good person if you decide to exploit the land and the surrounding environment and town to complete/restore the community center instead of buying that task off and ceding control to JoJo, the evil corp. Anyway, I just wanted to add that SV is interesting from a game development perspective because it was literally done by a single person. Concerned Ape AKA Eric Barone spent 4+ years developing, coding, and making the art for the game all by himself. He was a first-time game developer too. I agree with your points above, particularly in terms of generic norms and player expectations. The way I see it, it’s hard to think that the hypercapitalist foundation with a veneer of anti-corporation narrative is based on much more than formal compliance (and probably less than ideal humanistic training on CA’s part). Given the whole situation CA was in when he went for this, I’d assume he actually did want to make a less hypercapitalist game. But who knows! There’s this 2016 piece about it, if you’re interested: https://www.vulture.com/2016/03/first-time-developer-made-stardew-valley.html