ConcernedApe
Company
3 documents in the library are about ConcernedApe, from writers such as DiGRA and Udonis. Each has a summary and key insights with the page they come from.
Connections
Each row is a game or company named alongside ConcernedApe, each column a document, oldest first. A mark means that document names it. Select a row to see those documents.
Documents about ConcernedApe
The Pastoralization of Gambling: Historical Ideologies and the Casino in Stardew Valley
This paper argues that the casino in Stardew Valley, a farming simulation game, performs a cultural function that goes beyond its role as a gambling feature.
- The paper argues the casino in Stardew Valley "pastoralizes" gambling: it contains speculative desire and redirects it into a logic of productive agrarian labor rather than letting it disrupt the game's order.
- The analysis draws on American intellectual history, including Jeffersonian agrarianism, Turner's frontier thesis, and the tradition of "something for nothing" speculation, and treats game mechanics as procedural rhetoric rather than merely technical systems.
- The desert casino is spatially isolated from the town and farmland, mirroring the frontier as a bounded zone of risk outside established order.
Uncanny Homecoming: The Temporality of Dwelling and Return in Digital Games
This paper, written by Justyna Janik and Daniel Vella for DiGRA 2025, examines how temporality shapes the player experience of home places in digital games.
- The paper argues that the feeling of returning to a game home that no longer feels like home can be understood through the concept of the uncanny, drawing on Royle's 'unhomely at the heart of hearth and home' and a Derrida-inspired hauntological framework.
- Its central contribution is a taxonomy of five kinds of uncanny homecoming: narrative, progression, negated, abandoned, and nostalgic homecoming.
- Progression homecoming occurs when a player revisits a previously inhabited place, such as Candlekeep in Baldur's Gate or Kokiri Forest in Ocarina of Time, and finds it changed, a disjuncture grounded in the player's alterbiography.
Stardew Valley Sales Numbers 2016 – 2025
Stardew Valley stands as a landmark achievement in the independent gaming sector, having secured its position as one of the most commercially successful titles in industry history.
- Stardew Valley has sold 41 million copies as of December 2024, with more than half of those lifetime sales occurring between March 2022 and December 2024.
- The game has generated an estimated $518 million in gross revenue, resulting in approximately $152.8 million in net revenue after platform cuts, taxes, refunds, and discounts.
- Developed entirely by Eric Barone (ConcernedApe) over four years, the game was built using C# and Microsoft’s XNA framework.
