Staying classy? In THIS economy?

Getting Cozy

I'm trying not to make this little boutique blog "here's a thing I said on bluesky in long form" but sadly, social media's immediacy means I get to work ideas out there and then talk about them again later. Plus, a blog post is a little less... ephemeral, for people who may have missed what I said before.

Earlier this week I saw/read a blog post called "a wholesome plane has hit the second cozy tower" (god, what a subject line), which is about a game called Nothing to Declare, a cutesy-looking TSA simulator.

It's an excellent post you should read; I had a little mini-rant about the situation on bluesky the morning of that I'm going to elaborate a little on here.

As Gio says in their blog post, Nothing to Declare is just straight up Papers, Please with a colorful/cartoony/almost Playmobil-esque aesthetic. They go on to mention how, critically, Papers, Please's aesthetic choices have a direct influence on its message, and that message is definitely not "hey, wouldn't border crossings during Cold War balkanization in Eastern Europe be super fun?".

If you read the "Cozy Games Manifesto", the designers and scholars who put forth this concept of "cozy games" in 2018 suggested three pillars of what constitutes cozy design:

Historically, I have had what I would loosely call an 'adversarial' relationship with the concept of 'cozy games' or 'wholesome games,' but I want to stress that my opposition is not (and never has been) rooted in a rejection of these pillars. Certainly in the seven years since that manifesto, the need has thoroughly skyrocketed for games that shy away from stress, anxiety, violence, and precarity in favor of providing a space where players can have — and I use this word with very real reluctance — escape from the world being on fucking fire all the time.

When I was discussing Nothing to Declare, I mentioned that its devs and/or publishers likely are marketing it as cozy or wholesome (the game's Steam copy literally says "in a wholesome setting," which... yikes) partly because it's not 'violent,' but that's so thoroughly not the case! The type of screening they've based the game on is often invasive, intrusive, and riddled with actions taken based on racist or transphobic stereotypes/prejudice. It's the very picture of state violence. As Gio said in their post too, how could anyone think of that as "cozy" or "wholesome"?

You could see the "softness" represented here somewhat by the game's graphical approach: cartoonish, rounded edges, colorful but not loudly colorful. Cute, in a word, but the Cozy Manifesto explicitly calls out cuteness as "adjacent" and "overlapping but not-cozy":

While cuteness resonates with the safety aspect of coziness, as well as the desire to nurture/satisfy needs, many threatening and needy things can be cute without providing coziness.

That, right there, is one of the things that bothers me about the rise of "cozy" games. Whatever you feel about them, that manifesto and the thinking behind it represents a philosophy of design: a way of thinking and approaching the design that is holistic, where design choices have specific intentional outcomes and which, importantly, work synergistically inside the game system.

This is a discussion I have teaching game design all the time: everything you put into a game ends up as part of a gestalt when the player gets their hands on them. That interdependency means that game elements aren't interchangeable to produce the same effects! In his blog post, Gio mentions the "young witch in the Alps" problem, referencing a well-known social media post (sorry, it's on X and I'm not linking to that) where someone said they loved Disco Elysium but wished it could be "about a young witch trying to solve the disappearance of her neighbour's cat in a small village in the Alps" instead of a "grimy detective story" about a middle-aged white dude.

I had a long discussion about that in The Group Chat that morning, because this put me in mind of another thing that drove me batty: "Why do we have to HUNT the monsters in Monster Hunter? Why can't we pet and be their friends?" Because it's literally called Monster Hunter! You could make a game where you pet vaguely photorealistic monsters while carrying a giant fucking sword on your back but it won't be, and I can't stress this part enough, Monster Hunter.

I understand, I truly do, wanting all the [x] out of something you like, and wishing you could get rid of the [y] that you don't, but the problem is that game elements aren't drag and drop. You can't go "well I'll take the Disco Elysium conversation mechanics and writing quality, and drop them onto this Kiki's Delivery Service setting" and expect the same thing. It doesn't work that way! That's not to say wanting what that result looks like in your head is wrong, but the problem is that the route there is not as simple as "mix [x] with [y]" or "add [x] to [z] instead of [y]." You have to find the distinct recipe that would produce your outcome.

Which is the problem with the current "cozy" and "wholesome" game market: rather than approaching coziness as a design philosophy, they are approaching it as an aesthetic. In fact, I can't even call it an aesthetic, because a proper aesthetic is its own form of gestalt, drawing in multiple elements with a purposeful affective outcome. It is pretty literally a coat of paint. It is dragging and dropping the same vague cartoon look (and occasionally bland soundscape) onto whatever the fuck you want and saying "There! That's the 'cozy' the kids are buying up, right?"

The result is, unfortunately for the valid philosophical underpinnings of the original approach, a term that has been so egregiously misused as a marketing approach that it is well over the horizon of meaninglessness and accelerating quickly. Which sucks, because what suffers in this case is the discoverability and discursive power of games that do adhere to the philosophy, that do accomplish something along the lines of what that original manifesto had hoped for.