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https://www.theguardian.com/games/2025/jul/10/cosy-video-games-non-violent-cooking-farming-cozy>
"In 2017, a game design thinktank called Project Horseshoe gathered a group of
developers together to define the concept of cosiness in video games. Games, of
course, have had non-violent elements since the medium was invented. Early life
simulators such as 1985’s
Little Computer People, a low-stakes game in which
the player interacts with a man living his unremarkable life in a house, could
fit the bill; then there was the proliferation of social farming simulations
after 1996’s chibi-adorable
Harvest Moon.
But the resulting report,
Coziness in Games: An Exploration of Safety,
Softness, and Satisfied Needs, is probably the first organised effort to
define a then-emerging genre. The group zeroed in on three core things: safety,
abundance, and softness. Cosy games (cozy in US spelling) don’t have high-risk
scenarios: “There is no impending loss of threat,” they wrote. They must have a
sense of abundance: “Nothing is lacking, pressing or imminent.” And a soft
aesthetic wraps everything up like a warm hug.
Take developer Witch Beam’s puzzle game
Unpacking, for example, which tells a
story as the player takes things out of boxes and puts them into different
houses. There are limitations to where you can put things: it’s a puzzle game,
after all. But there’s no timer, no scoring system, no punishments for placing
something wrong. And colorful pixel art brings it all together.
Project Horseshoe’s definition came alongside the launch of the Nintendo Switch
in 2017, a handheld console designed to be cosied up with on the couch, and at
that time the genre was experiencing huge growth. By 2019, indie game designer
Matthew Taylor had started a Twitter account – called Wholesome Games – to
highlight games that fitted the definition. Eventually, Wholesome Games (led by
Taylor and partners Jenny Windom, James Tillman and Victoria Tran) grew into a
community that hosted showcases full of cute and non-threatening games, and it
has now become a company that publishes them.
The success of Wholesome Games mirrors the immense growth of the genre as a
whole. The first Wholesome Direct was broadcast in 2020, as the cosy genre
began to explode during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns (thanks in no small
part to Nintendo’s chill island escape
Animal Crossing: New Horizons), and
had 25,000 viewers, Tillman claims. The most recent Wholesome Direct, which
debuted in June, reached 5 million people."
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*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
