Milking Cows: Female Subjectivity in “Harvest Moon: Boy and Girl”

by Megan Townsend

About six years ago, sometime during the middle of my second year of university, an ex-boyfriend introduced me to Harvest Moon 64. It’s one of the few times that he enthusiastically urged me to play a game and I actually did. Now, an amicable break up later, I find myself still consuming most Harvest Moon games as they come out. With the exception of the Nintendo DS version, I adore Harvest Moon and have a particular love of the Rune Factory Series. Rune Factory relies less on the farming mechanic than it does on RPG elements.

My game usually proceeds as such: I wake up daily at 6pm and down breakfast in one gulp. Sometimes I have a dog. I pick him up and give him a cuddle before heading to the fields or attending to my cows. I wish I could say that the farm was my life but it’s really a means to a romantic end. The ladies like it when I give them turnips. The boys do too for that matter.

I find the object of my affection wandering town, thrust the precious resource at them in a gifting fashion and his or her heart level goes up. I go home to bed and the cycle repeats itself the next day. Such is my love life and I keep coming back for more.

A life, of sorts, is built in these games. A life that relies on character interaction and relationships, an economic standing in the community of the game, and savvy attention to the weather, soil quality, and the happiness of one’s livestock. The game doesn’t end at a set monetary goal but rather goes on and plays past the ending. Your character can be married, have children, watch his/her friends get married in turn. Life plays out and creeps along though, admittedly after a certain point, nothing much really happens of note.

Kinda like real life at times.

Keep in mind that most Harvest Moon games, until recently, had strictly male protagonists. I never took much issue with this until, lately purchasing a PSP, I came upon a Harvest Moon game I had yet to play – Harvest Moon: Boy and Girl. As a pseudo-remake of the Nintendo 64 version of Harvest Moon, I would get to play the game again but as a woman. I was great amounts of nerdly excited…

… until I realized that, unlike most other Harvest Moon games, the girl version ends after marriage.

I really can’t put enough ellipses to indicate the rage I feel over this…

The boy version can build a farm, build relationships, get married, have a child, and continue on in the community. The girl version disappears after she gets married. She has an ending. There is no writing past that ending as marriage. Over. Done. I don’t get to continue as a woman. My goal is marriage.

To paraphrase my husband, my partner in feminist concerns, “does the character continue on at the farm after she gets married? Does her husband take over?” Who knows! Maybe they get divorced. Maybe he kills her for the farm or the insurance money. It doesn’t really matter because the game effectively does kill her.

Perhaps you think I over-react. But I don’t. To be fair, the game is more a remix than a remake. Many things are changed; characters are reworked and the village isn’t the same. A PSP game is limited in format for technology reasons. The boy version did come first and the female version was added after. But why not put the same care and depth into the female version? Not only this PSP remake feel a bit like a company cutting corners to re-release a game for further profit at little cost to itself, it’s a particularly gendered cut. Natsume, the maker of Harvest Moon, didn’t feel it necessary to put the same work into the girl version of the game.

I like to play as a female character. I don’t need an avatar or a direct correlation to my self in a video game but I, as a feminist and as a person , like to have representation of my gender in the games I play. However playing as a girl in Harvest Moon: Boy and Girl eliminates a large portion of game play for me. Someone willing to play as a male character effectively has about 50% more gameplay than I do as a female character.

Furthermore, the insinuation is that as a woman my life’s goal is to get married. Yes, it is a good portion of the game regardless of gender but for the female farmer, it is the end. And after that goal, I no longer have any ambition, even if that ambition might simply be to tinker around on my farm and play fetch with my dog. Not only do I not get these things after marriage, but I am not given the option of proposing to my Harvest Moon boyfriend when the time is right. I have to wait around for him to pitch woo at me. He has story events that I get to observe. I have little to no agency in this Harvest Moon’s romantic relationships aside from the gift giving.

To “write past the end” is to acknowledge that a female subject has a life and that human life cannot be so easily contained within a neat narrative arc and that life continues after a “happy ending”. I always appreciated Harvest Moon for allowing open gameplay; it matches the genre of the game itself as farm life, and life in general, is slow, creeping, and lived in tinier moments. The female character in Harvest Moon: Boy and Girl isn’t given any tiny moments, just the big moment of marriage and then, essentially, death.

As for me, my gameplay solution is simple. I wake up in the morning, water my turnips, play with my dog, harvest my crops. I make eyes at the blacksmith, flirt with the farmhand at the vineyard, and bring lunch to the chicken farmer down the road. I marry no one and my attentions are for everyone. If marriage means the end, I’m happy continuing to live as the town tart. At least that way I can be sure that my cows get milked.