What Narrative similarities do a Trophy room and Stardew Valley share?

Game title menu artwork. (Barone, 2016)

A narrative is a story with two aspects, a plot or known known as a chain of events and presentation of how the story is told. (Hartley, 2002).

The use of a Trophy room troupe is highly evident in game design to allow players to create their own story while playing through a sandbox style game such as Stardew Valley.

A little background of Stardew Valley: The story starts off with your character stuck in a desk job role for a large corporate company and feeling stifled in your job role. A letter from our grandpa arrives and you find out that he recently passed away and has left you his old farm if you decide to go for a change of scenery. This opens up to the main game play where you can begin building your farm from scratch. (Barone, 2016)

The whole game uses the trophy room trope where your whole farm acts as a giant trophy room. The narrative is essentially up to the player to decide on how it is told through in game decisions. It is ultimately your decision as to how the game feels at the end of your play through.

Various NPC in game have fully furnished rooms that act as Trophy rooms to introduce a little more narrative to each character. (Non-Playing-Character) (Nexus Mods, n.d.)

You can build a massive farm to harvest certain crops or just focus on in game mini-quests or collect items and customize the look of your farm with different furniture and accessories which can be bought or built yourself. The open ended result after your first day results. The narrative is predominantly non-linear, besides in the beginning and the set seasons and certain in game character cut scenes.

Everyone is friendly so the player can visit most houses during the day to socialize with NPC's going about their daily routines. The layout and furnishing of each house is purposeful and reflect the personalities of each character from how their houses are designed. The notion of trophy room is explored since you can enter each main characters rooms and click on objects around their room to find more about the characters personality from letters from friends to books on how to become a better husband or wife. This gives a sense of a storytelling that is dynamic and driven by the player as they become better friends with everyone to be allowed into their personal rooms.

In summary, when applying the Trophy room trope to Stardew Valley there are many examples of the trope used in the game's design from NPC dialogue to the way in which you are introduced to the game play.

The major appeal of this type of game can be seen the by the multitude of tropes written into each character. For this blog I will focus only on the character you start out with either female or male. You start as a White collar worker ("Stardew Valley / Characters - TV Tropes", n.d.) and feeling overworked and under appreciated you decide to take up working at the farm your grandpa gave you when he passed away.

Your character can fully obey or subvert the trope later in the game by either joining the Joja corporation of which you left in the beginning and turn the game into a money churning profit business by optimizing your in-game statistics or play the game according to the story and obey the trope to realize your characters new life as a farmer and restore the farming community center whilst running errands to further the story line and build your personal in game narrative.

---

Hartley, J. (2002). The key concepts (3rd ed., pp. Page 154-155, Narrative). USA: Routledge.

Barone, E. (2016). Stardew Valley. Retrieved from https://stardewvalley.net/

Nexus Mods. NPC Houses [Image]. Retrieved from https://www.nexusmods.com/stardewvalley/mods/763

Stardew Valley / Characters - TV Tropes. Retrieved from https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Characters/StardewValley