The Cozy Game as the ultimate fuel for creative bankruptcy

Cozy Game

As we sat at home during the pandemic, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, for many, was a formative experience as they managed to preserve control over a severely disrupted daily life. It was great unless you frequented Instagram and Reddit to an unhealthy extent. Very conventionally beautiful posts would spark island envy to the point where people became burnt out in a game that originally promised an escape to a restful island for you to call home. I think this was the beginning of a broader phenomenon in which people manifest their self-ascribed lack of creativity in envious online practice, leaving them vulnerable to rage bait and predatory design often found in gacha games and mind-numbing number-slop*. You see something impressive, you realize the time and effort required to get there, and instead of tackling the beast, you disengage entirely. In its place, you might gravitate toward systems that reward you constantly without asking for expression, where progress is measured in funny big numbers rather than unfolding a system to make it yours. Any cozy game community slowly mutates into a space where showcasing replaces experimenting, and participation starts to revolve around reproducing a shared aesthetic rather than engaging in a shared process. What's left is a community of gamers that becomes isolated from the creative practice game designers try to encourage. And as studios are bullied into "listening to their fans," any game that once dared to challenge you creatively, now has turned into numbers-go-up in some shape or form.

* games with minimal input and maximal visual feedback: conventional gacha (i.e., Honkai StarRail), anything akin to Vampire Survivor and Balatro

Slowdown

Opening a feed, seeing an intricately designed island, and then returning to your own unfinished one can make it feel like there is no obvious next step. Instead of placing a single object, you close the game. Now, not all is lost. With the recent release of Pokopia and Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, there has been a lot of discussion on the state of creativity in those inherently creative games. Pokopia players especially are daunted by the scale of the game's canvas as skilled builders are all over their timelines. The community has been embracing the imperfect builds and advocating for building poco a poco, and that very practice of de-acceleration, I find essential for engaging with creative games in the first place. However, this remains rare. Most advice people give to people asking for help goes along the lines of the classic ACNH, "rush the story, flatten your island, and start from scratch."

With Tomodachi Life being a deeply personalized experience, players are not able to share their island resources directly. Not only are people encouraged to create anything raw and messy all by themselves, but they can do so without any filter intervention. I believe this is great, and it reminds me of the beautiful Drawn To Life, yet people are still negotiating this decision. I remain curious about the discourse and will probably elaborate when I have had my own experiences, but I sure would love to hear about the experiences of some of my peers! For now, I will roll with the following thesis: The less a system allows for direct comparison and replication, the more it preserves creative experiences. The imperfect messy aesthetics of the game support this by resisting any clear standard to optimize toward, and I hope it brings to fruition a thriving tool for self-expression and entertainment.

Engage/Avoid

To end this rambling, here's a pretty generalizing and opinionated guide on when to frequent social media spaces discussing any creative video game.

When to avoid online discussions on creative games?

• I am considering buying the game. ~ Check professional reviews you trust instead.
• I don't know what to create in the game. I am not creative. ~ You may have seen TONS of finished projects, and your own starting point fades in comparison. Take a break, do some ugly sketching, check with your peers, and just start with some shape. You've got this.
• The game has too many tools for me to make sense of. ~ Pick one, use it poorly, and don't look at the time you need. It's not a race.
• Everything I create is ugly. ~ ... at first! Keep at it, as this serves as a draft. Call it a day, move on to a new project, and you will eventually return either way.
• Everyone is a lot better than me. ~ A picture rarely entails the time invested in it, so go on that journey yourself now.

When to engage with online discussions on creative games?

• I seek direct inspiration for something I am currently creating.
• I am in need of peers to share my work with.
• I am sharpening my skills.

Theatrics

Chances are you have already been feeling somewhat bad about your own creative work even outside of this game context. I like to say to myself that any bad feeling should either be countered or amplified through theatrics. Everything I create is awesome, as opposed to whatever my imagined perfect piece is—this one actually exists. It occupies space, you infused it with all kinds of decisions, and you can return to it. When I see some incredibly skilled piece that I could never replicate, I will lose myself in being a snobby critic. I don't act on it, and I quickly disengage, but having these reflections is somewhat important as we try to survive the volatile feeds of social media.

A Cozy Game (derogatory) is a video game that emerges from community practices that prioritize homogeneous, highly legible aesthetics and curated outcomes over the messy, exploratory processes of play, turning what should be open-ended creative engagement into a comparison-driven culture of replication and display.