It’s a dark and stormy night, but you’ve equipped yourself with the means of resistance, a method for coziness. You’ve got a warm blanket, a crackling fire, and a cup of hot cocoa. This scenario, familiar for most, usually requires some form of entertainment. Tradition’s sake would tell you to read a book or put on a movie, but look to the Internet and you’ll see a new option: a video game.

Your warm, comfortable gaming session does not usually involve first-person shooters, space invaders, or even high-definition graphics. Instead, you’ve most likely picked up what has come to be known as a cozy game. The realm of coziness can be difficult to define because cozy is, of course, a relative term, but cozy game influencers often designate two prominent examples: Animal Crossing (2020) and Stardew Valley (2016).

These are slow-paced games that often include elements of design, gardening, and the ability to develop relationships with non-player characters, among other things. Both games present a prominent aesthetic of cuteness and allow the player to experience it with others, even from a distance.

Perhaps the most significant feature of cozy gaming is that it caters to a primarily female audience and creates spaces in which women feel safe playing and discussing games online. In Ready Player Two, Shira Chess writes that most games have been designed with a male audience in mind almost since game history began. In the few attempts in which game design has been women-skewed, games attempt to replicate stereotypical feminine ideals, like cooking or fashion (see Nintendo’s knitting machine, marketed as an attachment for the NES console). Cozy gaming, while not completely free from gendered mechanisms, still represents a new front in game studies.

The public conceptualization of cozy gaming is relatively recent, with most scholars and writers attributing the popularization to the COVID-19 pandemic. As such, there is little scholarship written on cozy games, and they are not included as a genre even in texts that attempt to create exhaustive lists of game genres. The articles in this week’s edition of In Media Res attempt to rectify this gap.

Bibliography

Chess, S. (2017). The book "Ready Player 2: Women Gamers and Designed Identity" was published by University of Minnesota Press in 2017. University of Minnesota Press.

Emily. “The Nintendo Knitting Machine: Allowing You to Knit Sweaters on Your NES.” Knitting for Profit, November 1, 2012. https://www.knittingforprofit.com/blog/the-nintendo-knitting-machine-allowing-you-to-knit-sweaters-on-your-nes/.

Petrus, A. (2024). I Started a Garden and Ended Up with a Global Industry: The Neoliberal Ethos of “Cozy Games." The Spectator, 44(1), 44–51.

Wolf, M. J. P. (2002). The medium of the video game (1st ed.). University of Tex