At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the visibility and cultural import of the so-called ‘cozy game’ reached what may still represent its zenith with the release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020). The game frequently offered scholars a focal point to study the ways video games could help with stress relief and social coping skills (Pearce et al., 2021), while mainstream news publications likewise commented on how Animal Crossing gave “players a feeling of empowerment and community” during the self-isolation of our large-scale quarantine (Khan, 2020). Of course, cozy games have earlier roots in the industry’s casual game movement—which itself was historicized most directly by Jesper Juul’s A Casual Revolution (2012)—but the frequent connection made between self-care and cozy game design feels, in many ways, inseparable from the role video games played during the heightened stress of the pandemic. Now that we are a few years removed from Covid’s cultural touchstone, cozy game design occupies a curious space in modern gaming, straddling a line between the growing prominence of the indie game market and more mainstream efforts to capitalize on the enduring appeal and accessibility of the genre’s most successful offerings. Within this growing development trend, VR game designers have naturally attempted their own versions of what might make for a ‘virtual reality’ cozy game. However, in the process of translating the cozy game to a VR space, producers have also potentially hit upon the limits of what could reasonably define the already broad genre of cozy gaming. VR titles may reasonably approximate many of cozy gaming’s features, but its use of immersive technology will ultimately convey the passage of time as a completely different gaming aesthetic.

At this point, it is worth noting that while VR gaming may make an awkward fit with cozy game design, it does share clear ties to the casual game aesthetics of the previous decades. After all, VR relies on a more complex iteration of the same kind of mimetic interfaces that helped launch the casual gaming standard bearer Nintendo Wii. As with the Wii, the Meta Quest leans on its integration of motion controls with straight-forward game titles that its users can easily pick up and put back down. However, while casual gaming and cozy gaming may share similarities in the simplicity of their instructions and their general accessibility, VR’s version of casual gaming leans far closer to 1980s arcade design, where the ‘pick up and play’ feature of popular tiles like Beat Saber (2019), Pistol Whip (2019), and SUPERHOT (2016) is joined with fast-paced play, frequent game resets, and even the integration of online leaderboards. ^[1] There is even an app for the Meta Quest that tracks your calories while playing these games, which is hardly the ‘chill and cozy’ we might associate with the cozy gaming market. Of course, a game like Beat Saber is not trying to be a cozy game at all, but it’s worth considering how the typical VR game attempts to differentiate itself in a crowded market.

While games like Beat Saber and SUPERHOT offer what I would consider the clearest vision for what VR game design can provide (at least at the time of writing), the headset’s game library is filled with more unusual titles as developers attempt to work out different niches for the growing platform. The VR version of ‘cozy gaming’ is currently represented most directly by a number of farming and crafting simulators that attempt to capture the same enduring success of the perennial indie darlings like Stardew Valley (2016), Forager (2019), and Spiritfarer (2020)—not to mention more mainstream cozy titles like Animal Crossing and Minecraft (2009). VR titles like Racoon Lagoon (2019), Garden of the Sea (2019), and A Fisherman’s Tale (2019) represent some of the greatest successes in low-stakes farming and crafting game mechanics with virtual reality technology. However, even at VR’s best approximation of a cozy title, the aesthetics of ‘coziness’ will ultimately feel completely different based on the immersive technology being used. While the core tenets of the cozy game genre may open to some interpretation—most notably because many game developers making commonly agreed-upon cozy games will still frame their work more broadly as part of casual game design—some of the genre’s suggested features include lower stakes, open-ended goals, a lack of violence, and an overall soothing or wholesome game aesthetic. Technically, VR gaming titles could reasonably integrate all of these mechanics to approximate the feel of a cozy gaming title. However, I believe the cozy game’s casual marking of time ultimately conveys itself differently within a fully immersive environment.

As players begin the typical modern VR game, they are frequently met with an extensive walkthrough that explains how the developers have integrated VR technology to allow its players to move around in their gaming environments. These walkthroughs are necessary not only due to a number of different approaches to VR game design but also the relative recency of the working technology. We should also note that new players in virtual reality can often experience ‘VR sickness’, a form of disorientation and motion sickness from moving around in an immersive gaming environment while still having sensory feedback from outside of your headset. These symptoms will typically lessen as players get used to the technology, but this is still a powerful barrier to wanting to perpetually ‘exist’ within a gaming space and reinforces the value of short bursts of play with the headsets’ arcade-leaning titles. Finally, prolonged VR play may result in players fogging up their headset display screen, a problem that has been frequently cited on several online VR gaming forums. In general, while game producers and Meta itself have frequently attempted to frame VR applications as a potential open, social environment, the novelty of the technology and the competing arcade aesthetics of many of its most popular titles could both work to undercut the desire to simply exist in these virtual worlds as a form of downtime leisure—much in the way that players have done so with other cozy games on PC and consoles.

Ultimately, the accessibility and relative ease of play in cozy gaming are simply at odds with VR’s more typically active play style and the nature of an embodied gaming space. This feature of VR is even emphasized in the promotional material of the Meta Quest 3, which almost exclusively highlights active gaming apps like Just Dance VR (2024), Beat Saber, and even the subscription fitness service Supernatural (2020). In contrast to the ease at which players can settle into a more traditional cozy game title, VR is constantly making you aware of its environment through the players’ presence in that space. As VR technology improves and players gain more experience with different genres in VR gaming, they may eventually find themselves able to settle down into a cozy VR environment. However, at the moment VR’s cozy game approximations will simply remind its users that marking time in games feels far different when you are directly placed within the environment of the game itself.

References

Juul, J. (20120). A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Casual Games and Their Players. MIT Press. 

Khan, I. (2020). Why Animal Crossing is the Game for the Coronavirus Moment. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/arts/animal-crossing-covid-coronavirus-popularity-millennials.html

Pearce, K. E., Yip, J. C., & Li, Q. (2021). Coping with Video Games During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Games and Culture, 17.5, 773-794. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/15554120211056125

^[1] Note: While SUPERHOT does not currently have an integrated leaderboard, earlier versions of the game did before it was taken down by the developers.