Everyone loves dressing up. While dress-up play might most commonly be associated with young girls and feminine fashion dolls, gamers love fashion as much as they love rapid action. The Reddit community r/FashionSouls, for example, serves as a hub for fashionable fans of From Soft games like Dark Souls (2011), Bloodborne (2015), and Elden Ring (2022). Likewise, players of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game Final Fantasy XIV (2013) have developed a maxim: the real endgame is glamour. Fashion Souls devotees and Final Fantasy XIV glamour addicts highlight that players can and will find relaxing, creative, and even cozy forms of play in the darkest, most difficult corners of gaming. After all, as Gideon de Pan and Frank G. Bosman (2024) observe about coziness in gaming, “every game can be or become ‘cozy’ in its own way and in its own right” (10). 

If coziness consists in giving players the opportunity to cultivate “a sense of belonging...easy socialization...self-fulfillment and self-actualization” (Waszkiewicz and Bakun 2020, 227), then dress-up and fashion games have been cozy even before cozy games emerged as a genre. Since the early days of Flash-based fashion gaming, dress-up games have allowed players to express themselves through fashion and interior design. Take Stardoll, a Flash game released in 2005, as an example. The game gives players virtual paper dolls to dress and two-dimensional rooms to decorate. The dolls and rooms are a canvas for both individual creativity and social connection. In-game activities like fashion contests encourage players to see their dress-up play as a semi-public activity that ties them to others with the same interests. The importance of social connection highlights another key component of cozy gaming: inclusive design (Waszkiewicz and Bakun 2020). Yet, though Stardoll includes men’s fashion items, and some clothing pieces can be used on both masculine and feminine body types, its branding suggests it is a women’s game. Promotional pictures feature fashionable female dolls in extremely feminine clothing; butch or ambiguous looks are possible, but not the ideal play style. This is par for the course with fashion and dress-up games. Some games, like the popular franchise Style Savvy, do not even offer players the option of a masculine body type. 

The designed identity of players for most dress-up and fashion games is, as Shira Chess (2018) argues, that of a woman who loves to shop for clothes. In Style Savvy: Trendsetters (2013), for example, shopping is a core mechanic of the game: players are boutique owners who craft outfits for patrons to buy. If they can convince patrons to purchase pricey items, players are rewarded with hefty sums of money to use on their own shopping trips to the town mall. Fashion play becomes a cycle of selling clothes and shopping for clothes that persists until the player shuts down the game. Sartorial creativity is, in many dress-up and fashion games, indelibly tied to consumption. 

Chess (2018) points out that in free-to-play games, the imperative to consume goes beyond the game world. She argues that success in Kim Kardashian: Hollywood (2014) can often only be achieved if players are willing to purchase premium items with real-life money. Stardoll is much the same; especially desirable pieces are locked behind special in-game currencies that players must either purchase or sink large amounts of play time to earn. Free-to-play fashion games thus always remind players that creative freedom does not come free. If you want to truly stand out from the crowd, you must be willing to open your wallet. The importance of consumption does not, however, decrease the coziness of fashion games; as Bettina Bódi (2024) demonstrates, cozy games simultaneously “[help] players cope with contemporary anxieties in everyday life” and “(re)present and reinforce neoliberal doctrines of individualism, extractivism, and the neverending pursuit of progress and growth." (60). In America’s neoliberal, consumerist culture, shopping is commonly understood as a therapeutic activity, especially for women. Yet, Chess (2018) suggests that consumption in fashion games is ultimately disappointing: “feminized gaming bodies are pushed to consume... but then denied the satisfying consumption allowed masculine gamers” who can do things with the digital products they buy (148). In free-to-play fashion games, players become “bodies that can buy clothing they cannot wear” (148).

In the upcoming fashion game Infinity Nikki (2024), Chinese publisher Papergames aims to solve this problem by imbuing fashion with power. A mashup of dress-up games and anime-based open-world adventure RPGs like Genshin Impact (2020), Infinity Nikki promises to be “the coziest open-world game.” From aesthetics to gameplay mechanics, it seems poised to deliver on this premise. It borrows many of the aspects that make games like Genshin Impact feel cozy despite their action combat systems: kawaii anime aesthetics, a vibrant color palette, and a dreamlike fantasy world filled with lush flower fields, adorable animals, and friendly NPCs. Unlike Genshin Impact, however, players do not need to worry about combat in Infinity Nikki. There is no danger in Infinity Nikki’s beautiful world, only new and exciting places to explore. Fashion becomes functional as players combine clothing pieces and accessories to facilitate exploration of the cozy fantasy world. Fashion in Infinity Nikki is also unabashedly girly. On its website and social media, there are no male characters; beautiful young white women are the stars of this story. Their long, candy-colored tresses flow in the wind. Ruffles and lace adorn their adventuring attire. Even the pale white skin of the characters reinforces the girliness of the game world, playing upon cultural connections between white femininity, innocence, and purity. “It’s glam time anytime!" the website assures players, with the visual reminder that glam time is on offer only to those with a proclivity for feminine gender expression.

What makes Infinity Nikki particularly worthy of mention is, however, its monetization system. Unlike other free-to-play fashion games that allow players to purchase clothing items through the medium of an in-game currency, Infinity Nikki locks its premium items behind gacha mechanics. Gacha games require players to use special in-game currencies to “pull” premium assets. Each pull rewards the player with randomly selected assets ranging from new characters to weapons and power-up items. New players are showered with the necessary currencies to test out gacha mechanics, but eventually, players find themselves needing to spend real money if they want to keep pulling new items. In Infinity Nikki’s case, players can buy pink diamonds to spend on Resonite Crystals and Revelation Crystals, which allow them to participate in resonance pulls and (hopefully) win new dresses, shoes, earrings, and hairstyles. If the barrage of names is confusing, that’s the point: obscure the connection between a player’s dollars and the items they pull in layers of cozy, whimsical intermediaries. 

What’s more, every item has a distinct percentage to appear in a pull. A player has only a 1.5% chance of pulling a five-star dress in Infinity Nikki; four-star dresses have the slightly higher probability of 3.29%. Anyone who has played a gacha game knows that most pulls result in only mundane, boring items. The thrill comes when you hit the jackpot and receive a rare item. Gacha, then, becomes a thinly veiled system of gambling. As Orlando Woods (2022) argues, most popular gacha games allow players to “game the game.” By optimizing play time and activities, players can accumulate the currency they need without opening their wallets. Yet, such optimization seems incompatible with the slow, comfortable kinds of play associated with cozy gaming. Infinity Nikki fans are thus left in a bind: play optimally to acquire as many pink diamonds as possible, forgo the beautiful dresses and hairstyles they want, or gamble. All options seem less than cozy, as worried fans express: many predict gloom and doom for their wallets as they gamble their dollars/pink diamonds/resonite crystals to hopefully win a five-star dress.

Agata Waszkiewicz and Martyna Bakun (2020) have laid out a taxonomy for coziness in games. Coherent cozy games are both aesthetically and thematically cozy; dissonant cozy games are visually cozy but have darker themes such as grief or death; and situational cozy games feature brief pockets of coziness in otherwise harsh game worlds. Infinity Nikki suggests that we may need a new category in this schema: exploitative cozy games. Building off work by Justin Buergi (2024), the category of exploitative cozy games identifies how games can use the aesthetics of coziness—llush fantasy worlds, fun kawaii aesthetics, calm gameplay loops—tto pull players into an exploitative financial relationship with monetization mechanics. Games like Infinity Nikki warn that the time of inclusive, genre-bending, indie-developed cozy games may be coming to an end as gaming conglomerates co-opt the vibes and looks of cozy gaming to pull players into the decidedly uncozy habit of gacha gambling.

References

Bódi, Bettina. 2024. “The Duality of Cozy Games: Cozy Agency, Neoliberalism, and Affect.” Replay 1, no. 11: 51-64.

Buergi, Justin. 2024. “Idle Games: A Cozy Genre Turned Exploitative.” Replay 1, no. 12: 29-42.

Chess, Shira. 2017. Ready Player Two: Women Gamers and Designed Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

De Pan, Bideon and Frank G. Bosman. 2024. “If All Is Cozy, What Isn’t?” Into the Magic Circle 1, no. 1: 1-11.

Waszkiewicz, Agata and Martyna Bakun. 2020. “Toward the Aesthetics of Cozy Video Games.” Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds 12, no. 3: 225-240.

Woods, Orlando. 2022. “The Affective Embeddings of Gacha Games: Aesthetic Assemblages and the Mediated Expression of the Self.” New Media & Society 26, no. 2: 823-828.