Image: Canva.
Every day is the same. I get up, make myself a coffee, and mumble ‘good morning’ to my wife Cleo, who is always up before me. She pacifies me with some encouraging words. I scratch Meowphistopheles (my cat, if you couldn’t guess) under the chin and start work. After a quick scroll through several rejections to stories I’ve submitted, I can feel my mood start to dip, so I distract myself with another scroll, on social media this time. Often I wind up wandering the house looking for sources of inspiration, sometimes picking up a book or taking a nap after lunch. Most afternoons, Cleo suggests a walk to clear my head, which we do as the sun starts to sink below the horizon.
None of this is my actual life. I’m playing Bad Writer, a ‘cosy game’. You play as Emily, who has decided to spend a month pursuing her writing career. I discovered it while researching this piece and quickly became immersed. On the game’s official website, solo developer Paul Jessup says that while coding it, he kept telling himself: ‘I should be writing, I should be writing, I should be writing.’
Okay, same.
Cosy video games are an increasingly popular genre, designed to evoke the same feelings as a warm blanket or a steaming mug of hot chocolate—or in the case of Bad Writer, pursuing that dream career. Wholesome Games, a video-game curation community, lists some genre features: ‘low stakes, low stress, low violence, uplifting themes, or thoughtful representation of marginalised groups’. While a traditional video game is typically conflict and challenge-based, in cosy games the goals are less defined—think mundane or menial tasks like farming, gathering, exploring, cooking or socialising—with no clear endpoint in mind. You might play as a barista dispensing coffee and advice at a coffee shop populated by elves and orcs (Coffee Talk), an old man travelling through resplendent landscapes after receiving a letter (Old Man’s Journey) or be a frog who brews potions in the back of his van for a town full of chirpy elderly people (I made that one up). Ultimately, cosy games are about ‘vibes’ rather than a clear set of mechanics or aesthetics.
Cosy video games are designed to evoke the same feelings as a warm blanket or a steaming mug of hot chocolate.
Where cosy games were once seen as a niche for a quirky subset of players, they now represent a more significant share of the video game market. Turn of the millennium hits Harvest Moon and The Sims are the notable forbearers. But during the pandemic, the genre’s popularity exploded. Animal Crossing: New Horizons, released in March 2020, quickly became one of the best-selling video games of all time. Existing video game franchises are now incorporating cosy elements; for example, the challenge and puzzle-heavy new release Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom provides ample game space for activities like gathering food, exploring picturesque villages and wandering through sun-dappled fields.
The Sims 4 Greenhouse Haven Kit (2023). Image: @TheSims.
While I always played a variety of video games, my tastes as a teenager and young adult skewed significantly more ‘hardcore’. It wasn’t until a few years ago, fresh from a painful breakup, that I joined a ‘game club’—like a book club but for video games—and these gentle games cemented their place in my heart. The club had a focus on games by indie publishers. Cosy games invariably tend to be developed by smaller game studios, which are more likely to be diverse and women-led. Women, as well as non-binary and trans gamers, historically excluded from mainstream gaming spaces, have gravitated towards these games.
It’s important to note that cosy games are part of broader pop-culture trends. Cosy mysteries are having a revival, with films like Knives Out and books like Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series offering light-hearted nostalgic takes on the genre. ‘While noir profits from exploring our deepest anxieties, cosy taps into a need for self-protection that many readers are feeling right now,’ writes crime author S.J. Bennett.
It’s important to note that cosy games are part of broader pop-culture trends.
Even fantasy, a genre typically renowned for sweeping epic plots and high drama, has recently seen an influx of new cosy stories. Booktok sensation Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree is a ‘novel of high fantasy and low stakes’. The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna offers a ‘cosy, heartwarming, and uplifting magical romance’. Brandon Sanderson’s pandemic project, a series of Kickstarter-funded ‘secret novels’, includes Tress of the Emerald Sea, whimsical fare inspired by The Princess Bride with a central protagonist who loves collecting cups. ‘Cosy-punk’ is also becoming a popular science-fiction sub-genre. Far from the gritty cyber-punk settings of the past, Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built features a tea monk grappling with their purpose in a world where essential human needs are already cared for.
Thursday Murder Club (2021), Tress of the Emerald Sea (2023) and A Psalm for the Wild-Built (2021).
Meanwhile, in digital spaces, cottagecore, an aesthetic that celebrates simple, often pastoral-inspired living, proliferates. On Youtube, ASMR has become a multi-million-dollar industry. These videos help you relax by stimulating your ‘autonomous sensory meridian response’—also known as a brain tingle—via methods such as whispering, gentle sounds and the simulation of personal attention. Videos of people doing mundane tasks such as cleaning, studying and explaining their morning routines have also become popular content.
When real life becomes unbearable, it makes sense to try to escape reality. So it’s no surprise these trends have exploded during recent upheaval. But this new ‘cosy’ phenomenon is just like anything else in the self-care industrial complex—capitalism is the problem, and it will also market us the solution.
When real life becomes unbearable, it makes sense to try to escape reality.
If I had to select just one video game to play for the rest of my life, Stardew Valley would be far and above my first choice. In this game, you play as a young person, beaten down by their corporate existence, who inherits a farm from their grandfather. Players tend to crops and livestock and work to restore the community centre.
Stardew Valley (2016). Image: StardewValley.net.
My Stardew Valley habits were relatively benign until the 2021 Sydney lockdown, where after a (different) break-up, the death of a loved one, a sporting injury and a close friend’s illness, cosy games became my dissociation method of choice. I spent hundreds of hours improving Highgarden Farm, turning it into a finely-tuned winemaking empire. Sure, I could barely get out of bed in the morning, but I was turning over millions of dollars in profits! Yes, I had barely spoken to anyone outside of my immediate household for months, but I had twelve boyfriends and girlfriends! I was thriving!
And it’s not just me. Cosy games have increasingly become stand-ins for what we have lost under advanced capitalism. In the game Unpacking, a 2021 cosy game developed by Witch Beam, an independent Australian game studio, players unpack the female main character’s possessions over the course of her life, from her childhood bedroom to eventually, an entire house. While many Millennials and Gen Z have given up owning property, in The Sims we have our own homes to decorate. Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley both feature vibrant towns full of interesting characters, with attractive rewards for building these relationships. As our real lives became more fragmented and alienated during the pandemic and beyond, increasingly we’ve turned to games to simulate the community that we’ve lost.
I can hear the ‘let people enjoy things’ critique as I write these words—so let me be clear: I do think you can and should enjoy cosy games, books and social media content. I just want us to question why we have accepted a material reality that has us dissociating en masse. We are living in a world that regularly fills us with the kind of dread that makes us want to numb everything—are we really okay with that?
Cosy games have increasingly become stand-ins for what we have lost under advanced capitalism.
While I currently have most of my cosy game addiction in check, it’s still not uncommon for a particular impulse, which I’ve been told is my ‘detached self-soother’ mode, to have me reaching for my Nintendo Switch any time I feel an uncomfortable emotion. Increasingly, cosy games are being described as stress relief, a mini dose of therapy or even as ‘an antidepressant in game form’. There’s something dystopian about the way we are complacently soothing ourselves while the world burns. It’s not hard to imagine listicles recommending the best cosy games to play during the end of the world:
Cosy game recommendations to play instead of going to therapy
Wholesome games to play when the economy has collapsed
6 of the best cosy games to play during the Anthropocene
There are games within the cosy genre that balk this trend. A Night in the Woods, a 2017 single-player adventure game, deftly deals with themes of capitalist alienation, class and mental health. The game follows Mae, an anthropomorphic cat who has returned from college to Possum Springs, her hometown which is now grappling with hardship after the closure of the local coal mine. By following Mae’s mundane routines, the player is immersed in this world, particularly during conversations with the town’s older residents. Even Bad Writer manages to comment on several real-world issues in its short run-time. But these games are not outside the system. As video games become more ubiquitous, they increasingly contribute to environmental harms. They also become more expensive and time-consuming, and we run the very real risk of neglecting in-person infrastructure and communities of care when we sink ourselves into wholesome escapism. No game is truly devoid of politics, so these types of cutesy and sentimental games can seem increasingly out of step with reality.
Perhaps it’s precisely because cosy gamers tend to be those individuals that are more severely impacted by structural forces that we have turned to cosiness to get through each day. But maybe, just maybe, we’re also the people who will care enough to make the real world a better place to live. If we can give hours into building a home and community within a video game, I’d like to think that we can also make our actual existence a little bit more cosy.
