Some stuff I read on cozy games
Here’s some things I read for my most recent Unwinnable column, about Promise Mascot Agency’s odd and interesting place in the lineage of cozy games discourse. I ended up only citing literally two of these things, but it was good to wrap my head around how long variants of this conversation has been going on and the different arguments people have made, especially since I’ve normally heard people talk about these things in the ephemeral space of social media, where figuring out what someone was saying two days ago is an active challenge. Doesn’t really lead to the conversation evolving, you know.
The loose direction of dialogue I’ve sussed out from this is there was the empathy games discussion a while ago, which was a reaction to the eternal and annoying violence in video games discussion, and then empathy games faded from interest and got overtaken by cozy games despite representing similar arguments, or at least sharing a side of said argument, and then cozy games has the offshoot of wholesome games which is often used synonymously but gets confusing because Wholesome Games is technically a brand name now. The main difference I’m seeing is that the empathy games discussion seemed to center whether games could produce empathy in the player, a basically outward-facing altruistic motive, whereas cozy games seems more to center whether games can comfort or heal the player, a more inward, personally directed motive, and wholesome games comes with the cultural baggage of the word “wholesome”, which implies some level of innate morality or healthiness on the part of the piece of art itself. Then there’s side arguments about the role capitalism and the gamification of capitalism plays in all of this, and of course the eternal question of “can you be a game if—” mechanics discourse.
The one thing I did not find, which I was specifically looking for, was anyone talking about the connection between cozy games and cozy mysteries. Cozy mysteries/cozies are generally regarded to be a response to the sex, violence, and grime in popular mystery/thriller fiction post-the hardboiled era, which seems to me to be an obvious parallel to what cozy games are up to as well. Would love to know if we’d had that conversation before, and if not, I would like to pitch a discourse topic.
This is literally just a list of things I read a few weeks ago. They are not in chronological order. I have no commentary on the pieces themselves except to say I found them interesting to think about. For my actual formally edited thoughts on all this and the mascot game, please read my Unwinnable column.
Bunch of links
The Guardian, Nicole Carpenter - Cosy video games are on an unstoppable rise. Will they unleash a darker side?
“In the cosy, wholesome realm – but just in games in general – it’s such a young medium that we’re still discovering genres and mechanics,” Windom says. “And it’s rare when we do see something really novel come up. It felt to a lot of people, when wholesome games and cosy games emerged, that it was something they had never considered before. Instead of shooting in first-person, why don’t we take a photograph? These shifts happen. We’re still discovering what we can do with games.”
@kylelabriola cohost - regarding Cozy Games
In many "cozy games", the power fantasy involves being able to dress-up your avatar, decorate your home, cultivate a garden, be self-employed, etc. It's a power fantasy because doing those things in real life can be tiring, difficult, and expensive. So it's fun to do them in a fictional space.
Project Horseshoe - Coziness in Games: An Exploration of Safety, Softness, and Satisfied Needs
Coziness is a subversively humanizing design practice in a society built on monetizing base animal needs.
MOKKOGRAD - Comfort is a weapon
They claim that “Cozy games” in the way they define them, are anti-capitalist, because they offer a world where one’s individual needs are fulfilled and cared for, but in offering a completely apolitical, individualist and cowardly fantasy, all they do is reinforce the status quo. The piece assumes that “cozyness” is something that everyone can achieve and desire in the same way, when in reality both are very often restricted to only a handful of people. It is a deeply reactionary perspective on the world.
Esther Rosenfeld, Reverse Shot - Wanderstop and the Cozy Game
Wanderstop destroys the barrier between audience and character by erasing as much friction as possible for Alta. It ends by espousing the virtues of boredom, the value in doing nothing. You’ll reach the credits having earned no special rewards, completed no checklists, found no hidden objects. In this way, Wanderstop may be the first true cozy game, a game profoundly resistant to letting the player accomplish anything.
Inner Spiral - animal crossing
This evolution from a relatively uncontrolled life-in-miniature to a nearly fully customisable sandbox isn’t just some footnote in game design. In many ways, it mirrors changes in our real world and how we view identity and community. The early games forced me to be a neighbour, and to fit into a place and time and deal with a bunch of people I didn’t choose. The latest game lets me effectively curate every single aspect of my environment and even the cast of characters, I mean heck, you can find people talk about throwing away villagers like toys because they’re ugly or don’t fit the aesthetic. It’s as if the series moved from “join this community and find your small place in it” to “build your own perfect community to reflect you”. That change hits on how our sense of self and society has transformed in the era we live in.
Inner Spiral - iyashikei
To some people, iyashikei might seem pointless. Slow, uneventful. But it’s that very slowness that’s its strength. It gives people like me, people whose minds won’t sit still, whose brains are always trying to run before they walk, a reason to take a breath. And not just a quick gasp before the next sprint, but a real, deep breath. Maybe that’s what this genre is all about, finding the healing we didn’t know we needed, the kind that’s been here all along, in the slow, small, seemingly ordinary moments. It’s about learning to love the present without needing it to be anything more than it is. And for someone who lived half his life with a mind that seemed determined to never slow down, iyashikei taught me that maybe it’s okay to pause. Maybe it’s more than okay, maybe it’s necessary.
Unwinnable, Emma Kostopolus - Spoopy, Not Spooky: The Intersections of Cozy Games and Horror
And it’s therein that I think the mutual draw lies – across both of these genres, the name of the game is predictability. Whether you’re always gonna have a really good day or a really bad one, you know for a certainty when you log in which one it will be, and you can prepare accordingly. At the end of the day, players of both games are driven by a desire to live in a purely deterministic universe where we can see the gears turning and we have a 1:1 grasp on causality. It’s random chance, things happening for seemingly no reason, that pervade the horror of our day-to-day lives, and simply knowing what will happen in either direction is less stressful than reality.
Medium, Hilver - Wholesome Games Direct 2022
With this data what does a wholesome game look like in 2022? Using the most popular classifications and some inferences: An original game where you play as a character in a small town community with human-like but not necessarily human characters in a coastal or island woodland environment . Set in contemporary times you perform a paid service in the community with control over your appearance and close environment.
Unwinnable, Hilver - Wholesome Games Direct 2023
When the Wholesome Direct aired it was during a hitherto unseasonable heatwave and it was inescapable to me how much these games want to present an experience of a world with a safe climate. Not every game directly addresses climate change or the environment but it will be impossible to make any games without considering climate in the future or have development not be impacted by changing climate.
The fantasy is not as a migrant laborer, it is as yeoman farmer, who owns their land and can support themselves and those around them. It is quite a conservative fantasy and again is something that I can’t avoid linking to climate change, where people would be drawn to a simulation of being able to own your own space and provide for themselves.
Inverse, Ashley Bardhan - Cozy Video Games Have Nowhere to Go But Up
The secret to cozy games, however, is that they’re not just relaxing, they’re actually good for your brain. Inverse spoke to several experts to unpack the science of chill gaming and talked to the indie developers pushing the limits of where the genre can go next.
Vice, Gita Jackson - ‘Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ Is a Little Heaven in a World Gone to Hell
I may not be displacing a native people or anything like that, but it’s still hard to wash off the politics of the frontier when I play. The idea of finding “unoccupied” land and taming it, turning it into an urban society, is so entangled with colonialism that it is impossible to unravel that knot. But the analogy to real-world, extractive colonialism gets much more pointed when it comes to New Horizons’ two new mechanics: Nook Miles and crafting.
The Verge, Laura Hudson - Animal Crossing is a dystopian hellscape
Your interactions with everyone you meet are fundamentally transactional; your friendship level with a given animal in Pocket Camp only increases when you bring them whatever gifts they demand, items that can only be attained through physical labor. In return, they give you money and resources, a relationship that more closely resembles a boss and an employee than two mutually caring pals. At times, your “friends” will literally hand you sacks of money to express their appreciation — a friendship “bonus,” if you will. By design, this is what friendship boils down in Animal Crossing: the regular exchange of money and goods. Like the lesser animals consigned to their cages, your relationship is just another commodity to be bought and sold.
Games Industry.biz, Brie Code - Slouching toward relevant video games
I see multiple teams searching for new kinds of gun-free gameplay, but not thinking outside of re-creating the same natural and quite rightly beloved adrenaline high. They're missing some data. They're missing some perspectives.
Medium, Doc Burford - i was a teenage exocolonist (and so can you!)
So you’ll hear people talk about wanting ‘hope’ as a sort of abstract concept, and argue that having the aesthetics of hope in their art — wish fulfillment directed toward a conflict-free, cozy life where nothing goes wrong ever — makes their art inherently good, which is the same thing the fascists want.
Replay: The Polish Journal of Game Studies, Agata Waszkiewicz, Marta Tymińska - Cozy Games and Resistance Through Care
How do cozy games fit in the narratives of self-care resistance? Considering their emergence as a counter-genre to the mainstream, violent, fast-paced, competitive action and shooter game titles, it is diffcult not to see cozy games also as a reflection of the changing needs of the current players.
Alva Wäppling, Lovisa Walchshofer, Rebecka Lewin - WHAT MAKES A COZY GAME? A study of three games considered cozy
Based on observations, these games that are often put into the cozy games category, are seldom only cozy. Perhaps this means that classifying it as a genre will prove difficult, close to impossible. Instead we would like to propose a new approach to the topic, to look at it as an umbrella term and focusing on their commonalities in themes and design; to perhaps define it as an aesthetic ephemera. It is of our belief that stories and experiences of comfort, belonging, and safety fills an important role in the media landscape. In turn, with this paper we want to encourage designers to create these with intent and empathy, for else there is no rest for the never-ending turbulence.
Rainforest Scully-Blaker - The Politics of Wholesome Games: Conservative Comforts and Radical Softness
The way that wholesome games are framed by many players and tastemakers like Tillman suggests that their role is to instill comfort, a term which I use here to suggest that one is content with their present and is therefore less inclined to think about their future
Medium, Jane Friedhoff - Playing with Resistance
Producing a set of game rules is, by definition, inventing a set of possible encounters that are very different than those that guide everyday life. But we can go further than that. We can use game mechanics to point to our desired worlds, to express the gap between the current world and the desire world, to create spaces and languages to discuss this gap and how to bridge it, and to express those desires to even more people.
NPR, Travis Larchuk - In Gaming, A Shift From Enemies To Emotions
"There was a really interesting shift away from mechanics to storytelling," he says. More frequently he's hearing pitches where a game is not just about "shooting something; it's about an experience the developer had and wanted to communicate that idea in their game, or about this moment of beauty or sympathy."
Rhizome, Lana Polansky - Empathy is not enough
It’s fair to speculate that the ways in which violence is depicted in media, games included, have an effect on how people interpret violence. The discussion around the time “empathy games” hit the scene, however, was less about the nuances of violence and ideology in art and more a blanket condemnation (or defense) of violence in games. Those with a stake in the production of games were quick to pick up on the utility of studies that showed their potential benefits to young minds: if games were exceptional for their negative effects on players, all the better if they could be framed as exceptional for their positive effects. If emotions like empathy and compassion can accurately be measured, then “emotional maturity” becomes a special feature of videogames that can be sold as a product.
Vice, Cecilia D’Anastasio - Why Video Games Can’t Teach You Empathy
Psychologists interviewed for this story maintain that, in studies they conducted, violent video games negatively affect children when played consistently. In many cases, prolonged time spent playing games like Grand Theft Auto will increase players’ aggressive thoughts and decrease their capacity for empathy. Each time you kidnap and dismember an innocent woman in a video game, it turns out, you probably become a little bit more of a jerk. These “antisocial” games, as researchers put it, desensitize players to violence. Only recently, psychologists have set out to determine whether the opposite can be true for “prosocial” games, of which “empathy games” are a subset. Dr. Douglas Gentile, who runs the Media Research Lab at Iowa State University, is one of the only researchers who has written studies proving that empathy games can make players more empathetic.
Kill Screen, Dan Solberg - The Problem with Empathy Games
This is a common question when assessing the genre’s success: Do the players invest in the game’s storyline or are they more concerned with beating levels and achieving a top score?
DEEP HELL, Matteo Lupetti - Against Wholesomeness
And here we can see how a certain misinterpretation is born: since wholesome games have those anticapitalist undertones and they are proposed as an alternative to the big premium video game industry, people risk to think of them as “subversive,” “disruptive,” “radical.” I fear that we are misunderstanding how a radical game looks like, because we are not seeing radical experiences in the wholesome games scene and, on the contrary, this trend shows how deeply video games have been influenced by capitalist and antiradical concepts.
Molleindustria, paolo - Videogames and the Spirit of Capitalism
The tendency toward instrumental rationality offers a path of least resistance: it’s easier to make a game about shooting or physics than a game about a complicated friendship. It’s just something that designers have to be aware of and work against.
Medium, Kitfox Games - In Praise of Messy Design
The feeling of being bewildered (yet safe, for this is only a game) about the very nature of the way the world works is a unique power of interactive media. It’s the power of a plot twist, but amplified as the implications spiral outward and the player wonders how far or how deep this subversion can really go. A surprising design is more than just recontextualizing; it’s pushing the entire horizon of reality, when you discover the world wasn’t as rigid as you thought. What you thought was an invisible wall, or an arbitrary limitation by the author, melts away into a new dimension that begs for exploration.
Medium, Federico Fasce - About lightness in games
And it’s not to say that a light — in Calvino’s sense — game shouldn’t have a deep content. On the contrary depth is reached through that approach. This way of seeing lightness makes to me more sense than the easy label wholesome game, because it’s not about the content, but rather about the way that content is delivered. It’s about that beautiful meeting point of science, art and philosophy that to me is good game design.
Gamers with Glasses, Samantha Trzinski - Cozy Games, Romantic Poets, and (Anti-)Capitalist Sentiments
At the heart of these pastoral cozy games, there is also a sense of nostalgia—something that also appears in the poetry of the Romantic era. However, the nostalgia is not rooted in nature, as it is in Romantic poetry; instead, it is rooted in the games themselves.
Deciphering Glyph - Okay, I’m A Centrist I Guess
Cozy games are therefore a centrist critique of capitalism. They present a world with the prosperity, but without the cruelty. More importantly though, by virtue of the fact that people actually play them in large numbers, they demonstrate that the cruelty is actually unnecessary.
Cozy Games and Cottage Capitalism
But it's interesting to me that the game design that's engaging to most people requires a power curve, even in something as ostensibly "wholesome" as Harvest Moon. There has to be a feeling of "growth" or a player loses interest.
Rachel Pennington - Cosy capitalism and Stardew Valley
It’s not all doom and gloom however. Stardew‘s nostalgic quality is perhaps the greatest strength of the game, positing a world set comfortably in a pastoral-industrial hybrid. With graphics reminiscent of a childhood immersed in Nintendo, Stardew posits amicable competition as a motivator rather than as an obstacle to finishing the game. There is a certain comfort in an emulation of capitalism that will undoubtedly have a happy ending, even if it’s as unrealistically attainable as ‘perfection’ is.
Polyester, Eleanor Forrest - Cosy Gaming: Infantilising Or Anti-Capitalist?
In a world of higher costs and smaller gains, the cosy gaming trend offers a method of weathering the storm. By being active in this trend many of us gain the reset we need to return to the reality we’ve increasingly become dissatisfied and disinterested with and that we increasingly refuse to engage with any more than we have to. As we come home from work and shed the 9-5 from our shoulders, we create boundaries between our working culture and our need to self soothe and carve time to embrace prioritising our own mental health.
Replay: The Polish Journal of Game Studies, Andrea Andiloro - Comfortably Numb: An Ideological Analysis of Coziness in Videogames
This essay analyses the concept of coziness in videogames, focusing on their role as a stress-relieving diversion in modern capitalist societies. The article emphasizes the genre’s features of safety, abundance, and softness, which create an atmosphere that soothes players amidst high-paced, contemporary lifestyles. While often framed as a type of resistant design, it is argued that cozy games uphold capitalist principles, by encouraging players to replicate them within the game. The discussion extends to the idea of coziness in interior design within these games, which is shown to reproduce ideologies of class, status, and consumerism. Drawing from atmosphere theory as well as the works of Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Žižek, and Richard Dyer, the author argues that even the act of designing cozy spaces in these games serves as a continuation of capitalism and that cozy games may be thought of as utopian entertainment attempting to answer societal shortcomings through capitalist solutions. Thus, the essay posits that while cozy games offer a respite, they reproduce the conditions sustaining capitalist modernity.
Ian Bogost - Consumption and Naturalism in Animal Crossing
Animal Crossing isn’t the only game that successfully simulates the condition of affluenza. The Sims has been criticized for purportedly modeling consumption as a solution to loneliness and unhappiness. In discussions of that game, chief designer Will Wright has argued that the game’s rules are optimally balanced via equal pursuit of material and social capital, a part of the game’s caricature of American ideals. Sims respond more positively to player characters with more material property; they like friends with big houses and hot tubs.
Blair Bailey - It’s Times Like These That We Turn to Wholesome Gaming
Wholesome games allow players to play and connect with each other in the low activation, positive valence space.
Unwinnable, Ruth Cassidy - Wholesome Games, and the Context Collapse of Branding Culture
But like casual games, wholesome games aren’t an argument. In actively taking up space – rather than filling it in – Wholesome Games have to construct one. They do this a little awkwardly, framing wholesomeness as radical – while simultaneously allowing that dark, upsetting games, while not wholesome, are radical too, but also that righteous violence can be wholesome if necessary.
As I was putting this blog post together I found a bunch more shit to read on this topic. I reserve the right to edit this and add things. Have a #blessed day, all.