Crafting Comfort: Postdigital Practices in Current CozyGames

While ambient, slow, and wholesome games have been around for a long time (e.g., Fizek 2022; Hjorth and Richardson 2020; Kagen 2022; Scully-Baker 2024), cozy as an aesthetic signifier has become increasingly visible in recent years, carrying broad and diverse connotations in discourses around digital media in general and videogames in particular.Put in a nutshell, when used to describe videogames, it signifies a certain look and feel, in a way that transcends the conventionalized boundaries of videogame genres (e.g., Boudreau 2024; Pan and Bosman 2024).The observation that farming sim Stardew Valley (2016), puzzle game Unpacking (2021), roguelike Cult of the Lamb (2022), soft horror fishing game Dredge (2023), cooking sim Good Pizza, Great Pizza (2023), afterlife management game Spiritfarer (2020), and even the aptly titled PowerWash Simulator (2022) can be, and often are, described as "cozy" provides evidence of the nebulousness of the category.Regardless, some key elements of coziness are easy enough to point to: pastelly softness or playful vividity of both color palettes and sounds, a degree of cuteness, game mechanics encouraging slowness and repetition over fast-paced action, no imminent danger or frustration caused by high difficulty.From a developers' perspective, coziness can thus be taken to refer to "the fantasy of safety, abundance, and softness" (Short et al. 2018, n.p.) that is regularly evoked here.Cozy games' themes often feature the management of natural resources, interpersonal relationships, or real-life mundane scenarios like moving house, or the day-to-day tasks and processes of a workplace.Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, academic attention for the genre has increased since the COVID-19 pandemic especially, with questions explored in the existing research including feminist and inclusive design (e.g.,