If you’ve been reading (and watching) Insteading awhile, you may remember that I wrote an article about some things that pop culture gets wrong about homesteading. While enjoying a shared chuckle about the just plain wrong representation of our extremely diverse and varied lifestyles on the silver screen, I wanted to revisit the same topic in a slightly more positive way, and with a videogame bent. So I present to you The Homestead Video Game Awards (cheering sound)!
I’m fairly confident that the crossroads between “gamer” and “off-grid homesteader” are populated by as many people as I can count on two fingers (though it would be hilarious to know if there are more of you out there). Our solar-powered game system (because who says all off-grid living has to be purely, puritanically, practical?) gives us a unique insight into the way the rural life is portrayed in the digital world.
It also makes us pay attention to certain details that might otherwise be overlooked (like chickens — I always pay attention to the chickens). And believe it or not, I have been rather impressed by the accuracy of certain video games. Some of those game developers have really done their homework. Some obviously haven’t. I give awards to either, as you’ll see.
The criteria for these awards are entirely based on my biased opinion as an off-grid homesteader, and the fact that I am most familiar with stealth/open world/action RPGs. I have never played any of those farm simulators. Maybe some of them are pretty accurate, but I’ll never find out. After scooping poop, weeding, hoeing, and mulching all day, the last thing I want to do come evening is pretend it takes a single click of the mouse to pull the weeds, and another to produce a finished cabbage head.
Note: Despite many years of attempts, I’ve never managed to grow a real cabbage head on my droughty, hot hill.
(No, I’m not bitter.)
(Mostly.)
Whether you’re a gamer, and whether or not you’re a homesteader, I hope this bizarre set of awards will give you something to laugh at and even appreciate.
Best Representation of the Moon
I must, must, must start with the moon. You would think that the big bright ball of light in the night sky would be a fairly important element of a created gaming world.
After all, observing the cycles of the moon was a crucial part of early human existence, dictating the order of the calendar, the times to plant and harvest, and even when to hunt or stay indoors.
Everyone used to know the moon phase because it wasn’t trivia. It was important planning information. The natural world still dances to the ancient rhythm of the sky, even though most modern humans don’t even remember to look at the aforementioned big, bright ball of light.
That ignorance shows in (almost) every single game I’ve seen. No matter how realistic they’ve tried to make it, the developers seem to set the moon phases to eternal full moon where all the digital moths and sea turtles of the world must exist in perpetual confusion, or “shuffle” (where the poor moon yo-yos between first quarter, waning gibbous, full, and back to first quarter without any sense or reason — or physics, for that matter).
… and then there are the games where the moon is evil and trying to kill all life.
Anyway, the award for Actually Having the Moon Go Through Normal Sequential Phases goes to “Fallout 4.”
Whouda thunk that a post-apocalyptic game set 200 years after a devastating nuclear disaster would have the sense to remember the peaceful, beautiful rhythm of that big, bright ball of light in the night sky? It may have ghoulish mutants, 2-headed ungulates, radioactive water, and a charred, blighted landscape, but it has a logical moon that changes phases as it should, and as the ONLY game I’ve ever seen take that step toward accuracy, it heartily deserves this award.
Worst Understanding That Chickens Are Diurnal
Chickens are the most basic livestock you can have. For many of us who start to homestead, chickens are the first foray we’ve made into keeping something other than a cat or a dog. They’re a transformative creature to invite into your life, as they can turn you from a consumer into a producer of your own food. They’ve been filling this role with humans for literally thousands of years.
With so much human-chicken familiarity built up over millennia, you’d think game developers would have no problem representing chickens in the hundreds of games that have them. Right?
Wrong! I award this Worst Understanding of Chickens award to every game I’ve ever played. There is a simple criterion they have universally failed: Do the chickens go to sleep at night?
Next time you play a rural-ish game that has chickens, just you watch. I can’t find footage of every instance on YouTube at the moment (maybe I’m the only one who pays attention), but play these games … and you’ll see.
Red Dead Redemption 2
Chickens out at night. Our intrepid video editor, Hadley, did find some RDR2 footage of night chickens at 3:40, as you can see.
Kingdom Come Deliverance
Chickens out at night.
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
Chickens. Out. At. Night (and murderous to boot).
Wasteland 3
Well … I’ll give this game a pass. They’re cyborg chickens, after all, and they merge their powers to become a robot named “Poultron” so even though they’re out at all hours, we’re obviously not dealing with anything normal here.
Chickens on the Homestead
As anyone who keeps chickens knows, these diurnal birds go to sleep as soon as the sun goes down. They roost, still and quiet, until the sun welcomes them back to wakefulness. At night, chickens are extremely prone to predators for this reason: They basically turn off (which is good news for any chicken-keeper who wants to clip wings, trim rooster spurs, or do any other business to daytime-flighty birds).
We’ve got a LOT more about chickens here on Insteading, from our (free) Beginner’s Guide to Chickens course to our Chicken Database to our generous helping of chicken-based articles. Go learn more about chickens, and be smarter about them than pretty much any game out there.
Most AccuRAT Perception of Rats
In many games, rats seem to be background elements, a textural feature, but little more. Oh, you’re a pirate? Look! There’s a rat running down the docks. How atmospheric. You’re in a medieval town? Huzzah! See a rat running on eternal loop down the street and back again. How period appropriate.
You can even talk to them in games like “Divinity: Original Sin” where they give you helpful clues in adorably high-pitched voices. Sometimes, they’ll let you fight them, but they’re almost always low-level baddies. Nothing that an experienced warrior would waste their time on.
Rats on the Homestead
On the homestead, however, rats have been some of the most horrible enemies I’ve encountered. They spoil food (haven’t learned that the hard way, thankfully), chew up boxes in storage (found out the hard way), fill any void with their food caches and have an insatiable appetite for birds (found out the hard way for both). Late one fall, for example, my pigeon flock of 30+ birds was halved overnight by a single rat that killed them, one after the other, to store in its winter larder. In our early years on the homestead, rats also killed my chicks and keets, prompting me to provide much better nighttime housing for them.
I appreciate all the wild animals I encounter on our land, from the vultures to the foxes to those awful rats, and I understand they all play a role. Rats, for all their seeming horribleness, are intelligent survivors, using any and every opportunity to thrive. But that doesn’t mean I like them.
All that said, I have no problem finding black rat snakes. Particularly the big ones. They got that big by eating rats, after all. So here’s my mid-article PSA: Put the garden hoe down and let the snakes live. They do a lot less damage than rats.
(Ahem.)
Plague Tale Innocence
Anyway, I give the award of most accurate perception of rats to “Plague Tale Innocence.” The game is somewhat of a waking nightmare, of course, but the idea that rats can do massive amounts of damage is far truer than the idea of them squeakily offering helpful quest knowledge.
Granted, real rats don’t hideously geyser out of the ground (thank goodness), but when you see the toll they can take on your homestead, you’ll feel like they’re far, far more than background animation.
Best Realistic Size of a Garden
As an off-grid homesteader currently in the throes of figuring out how to grow the majority of my vegetable needs on my own land, I take special interest — and amusement — in the representations of gardens in many of the games I view. Though background peasants are a common enough feature in many a game, the village gardens meant to support them are lackluster, to say the least. Theyโre often shown with a whopping six cabbages, or maybe a single row of carrots. I suppose itโs supposed to be shorthand for โgardenโ and weโre supposed to move on to bigger and better quests.
Phantasy Star Online 2
“Phantasy Star Online 2” made the effort to give the seemingly self-sufficient town some raised beds at the game’s introduction, but showed a total of 20 plants to sustain an entire village.
That said, some games have taken the time to carve out a much more sizeable chunk of their in-game acreage to feed the agricultural NPCs.
Black Desert Online
“Black Desert Online” has some sizeable fields you can till for substantial amounts of digitized crops.
Kingdom Come Deliverance
But the award definitely goes to “Kingdom Come Deliverance.” The developers made an extensive effort to reproduce the look and feel of 1403 Bohemia, and that came complete with both farm and monastery gardens that were an appropriate size, and needed to be weeded of realistic species.
I’m sure some players found the tedious task of weeding to be a bit cumbersome, but this homesteader laughed at the effort taken to put dandelions and nettles among the crops and herbs.
Best Representation of How It Feels to Lose Your Animal
Any time you keep livestock, you will have losses (glances at rats). But when it’s a critter you’ve cared for every day, or walked with for years, it’s not something you dismiss lightly. To this day, I still cry if I need to butcher an animal. On a homestead, death is something as ubiquitous as life, and it’s not wrong to be affected by it, whether you’ve been homesteading for 1 or 40 years.
Many games make jokes out of punching chickens or have horses that function more as mere taxis-with-hooves rather than real animals, but some try to capture the bond that humans tend to form with the creatures in their care.
I found the following two games to be particularly affecting in how they represented the loss of the horse that you’ve ridden through the game. It was a companion, and when it died, the main character was filled with both sorrow and gratitude. It’s a rare moment in a gaming world typically filled with explosions, blood, and extravagant violence.
Red Dead Redemption 2
I give two games the award for Best Representation of How It Feels to Lose Your Animal. One to “Red Dead Redemption 2” for taking the time to let Arthur, even though he himself is dying and being pursued by enemies, to hold his downed horse’s head in his hands and whisper “Thank you.”
Ghost of Tsushima
And the other to “Ghost of Tsushima” where Jin, fleeing from deadly arrows, knows his horse is hit as he keeps riding, and still heartbreakingly apologizes to his companion as he slowly fades beneath him.
Shut up. I’m not crying, you’re crying. Stop cutting onions or something, guys.
(I need a minute.)
Biggest Affirmation That Becoming a Homesteader Was the Right Choice
“Cyberpunk 2077” was a whirlwind of a game, somehow juggling the threat of all-powerful corporations with the impact of AI escaping human control … with marketing’s manipulative effects on modern social castes … with the nightmare of transhumanism and the apathy of when there’s too much tech doing too much for people that they cease to care … with the eternal struggles of the elite trying to escape their own mortality. That’s what it was to me, anyway.
Maybe to some, it was more of a ridiculous, neon-soaked shoot-em-up with music that sounded like robots got caught in a woodchipper. Seriously, why was the soundtrack for that game so awful?
But for all its positives and negatives, there was one thing this game did for me, and it was earning this award: Biggest Affirmation That Becoming a Homesteader Was the Right Choice.
I won’t spoil the game for you, but I’ve reached one ending of the game and that’s the only one I’ll ever choose: Allowing V to escape the city. As he finally looks at the stars and lets go of the bullet that was supposed to kill him, he leaves behind everything that was his former life in Night City. It’s a story I know well in my own way, because it’s my story too. Granted, I’ve never been shot or had Keanu Reeves stuck in my head, thank goodness, but you get my point.
I don’t want technology to control my life. I want to be as self-sufficient as possible. This game was a big reminder of many of the reasons why I left the city (and never want to return).
Because at the end of the day, the games are a fun diversion, and one that is turned off and walked away from. In reality, the garden needs weeding, the moon is coming out (at the right phase), and the chickens are roosting because it’s night and that’s what chickens do). That’s the world I truly want to live in.
There you go. Let’s have a big round of applause for our winners, and if you have any runners ups (or your own awards to give) let us know in the comments below!
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