cat kouhai*.txt

Thanks for writing this up. Was doing double takes at the bits of that paper you posted on Mastodon...

"When you live in a world that denies you your right to exist, existence itself is an act of rebellion, and so is your desire for comfort."

yes yes yes

Highlight for me from that article:

To maximize safety, activities should be voluntary and opt-in so that players never feel the threat of coercion.

AHHH. I HATE this pseudo-moral judgement about moral games being "safer" for players because there isn't the "danger" that the player will face any friction in the gameplay to achieve their goals. I've seen it so much in the Palia player communities where anything that's too hard or annoying to them in the game is "decidedly not cozy" and both players and devs talk about coziness as a moral imperative, as if anything other than cozy is an act of violence upon the player.

This is a really good, nuanced writeup.

As someone who was pretty active in the Wholesome Games community and had a game showcased in the Wholesome Direct, I've admittedly got a bit of a kneejerk reaction to criticism, because there wasn't really any real nuance to the early critiques, mostly just alt-right backlash against the games being "woke".

"Wholesome Games" as a curator initially started as just a little twitter page highlighting lighthearted games. Of course now that it's become popular, there's been more and more people specifically aiming to fit some specific criteria of "coziness." Developers would sometimes join the WG discord literally asking about how they should change their games to get a better chance of getting into the Wholesome Direct.

I want to make games that are comforting, uplifting, fun experiences. But I also don't want to self-censor and sanitize and avoid serious or difficult topics.

goodPost , smiles nicely

While there's definitely issues in that article you pointed out(and you make a lot of good points), I think for most part the "liberal" approach of the games involved is largely a result of a lack of familiar cultural examples that people are familiar with to draw on, and also the nature of certain parts of games being relatively young. Regarding that latter point, games are still very combat focused(for complicated reasons), and so a lot of games that arent tend to be in specific subgenres with narrow lineages- like "cozy" games are often very firmly in a "inspired by harvest moon or a harvest-moon-inspired-game" sphere, so they havent wandered too far off that specific path yet, thus still centralizing on certain gameplay loops that involve money and small biz farming and so on.

So people come into this thinking "uhh i want to make a gmae that makes people feel safe and chill and impulsive" and they easily end up at harvest moon, or they just want to make a harvest moon style game in the first place period. For the former, it'd be really awesome to have stuff like "you work with your worker coop without pressure from consumer-minded-capitalist-bullshit" or "you gradually contribute whatever you work on to everyone" as a replacement for the work model in these games, alongside emphasis on people helping(in a non-production type way) each other in a more general less atomized sense.

But I struggle to think of any games that have those aspects in any genre whatsoever? And similar for other media at all. There's a distinct lack of just presentation of these alternatives in peoples heads. If you havent seen X significantly before, then you're almost never going to see it pop up in games of any concept/genre, and I think that generally reflects more on the broader conditions in which we are exposed to things(like the types of specific ideas people formulate and spread) rather than on the natures of those concepts like "cozy". Like there's a lot of general "here's what queerness looks like and how it can be liberating" in the culture, but "what does thoroughly implemented leftism look like" seems very atrophied to me in relatively visible culture.

Capitalism is going to coopt every positive term/experience we have and I feel like the way this sort of discussion tends to go can lead to us demarcating specific words as 'liberal' and giving them up. Honestly, I find "coziness" as a concept very appealing because of how great it would be in connection with leftist aspirations. It should be something we strive for in creations and its pretty easy to see the connection between it and central goals like destroying power structures, destroying economic fear, creating real support systems, etc- those things allow an environment where people can just live around others in joy without many fears we take for granted, which is why coziness is fundamentally appealing.

I think the Final Profit example is a good lens through which I feel like the term "cozy" is often used to mean the game makes you feel cozy when you play it because of how it does [or doesnt] engage parts of your brain. Basically, people calling a game cozy simply because it was relaxing to play it and got them in a flow state.

Which, confusingly, I think would mean that pretty much any type of game could be "cozy" if it put you into a relaxed flow state. lmao.

I feel like similar discussion arose because of Dredge and other things like that. Like can a game be "scary" and "cozy" at the same time.

I feel like it's only a useful term in that it's comparative to other games. Even more nebulous than "JRPG."

but I guess some people just see the little tutorial town with its golden fields and tiny shop and went "ah yes, wholesome and cozy"

Yeah, what all this has made me think about is, I like slow, low-key media that isn't driven by immediate interpersonal conflict, but not because it's cozy per se. I like it because it has access to weird emotions, melancholy or ennui or whatever, that aren't as compatible with an adventure story. Using "cozy" as the shorthand term for talking about these things does a lot of them a disservice. Not to say the criticism of stuff that's cynically cozy isn't valid.