Playing with Capitalism: Metareference, Comedy, andCoziness in Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion (Snoozy Kazoo2021)

Videogames excel at (re)creating hypercapitalist systems, operating on both a representational and procedural level (Bogost, 2007;Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, 2009).Despite their seemingly harmless aesthetics, the same holds true for cozy games: they depict, replicate, and engage with capitalism in diverse ways and to different extents.Cozy games, as introduced to game studies by Waszkiewicz and Bakun (2020), exhibit a high degree of abundance, safety, and softness on both the levels of audiovisual representation and game mechanics, allowing for the player to express a kind of cozy agency that lies between hegemonically performance-focused and radically slow forms of play (Bdi 2024).Games with resource management as a central mechanic often epitomize neoliberal ideology and a romanticized notion of work-as-play (Bogost 2011), frequently centering on rural fantasies (NYU Game Center, 2020).Tom Nook in Animal Crossing: New Horizons has gained widespread recognition as a "capitalistic villain" (Vossen, 2020).Similarly, despite the best intentions of its creator, Stardew Valley (ConcernedApe, 2016) can be interpreted as drawing players into a gameplay loop that oversimplifies our connection with and responsibility for natural resources, as well as the complexities of platonic and romantic relationships (Crowley, 2023).Recent years have seen a proliferation of indie meta-games, that is, self-aware and self-reflexive games that trigger medium-awareness in the player (Krampe 2022).Cozy games, many of which are indie, are also increasingly inviting players to reflect on issues of medium, genre, and gaming culture.For example, Fin in Bear and Breakfast (Gummy Cat 2022) is a parodic take on an agent of a holiday let chain, ceaselessly urging the player to maximize profit with a bed and breakfast enterprise, with dialogue lines like "We are freely able to exploit a common resource to their benefit and our profit!",thereby parodying the extractivist mechanics of many cozy games This paper looks closer at another example, Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion (Snoozy Kazoo 2021) to argue that cozy farming/adventure games can be a uniquely expressive playground that invite players to reflect on the relationship between games and capitalism, especially when they create humor through metareference.Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion is a cozy adventure game about avoiding paying property tax.It features a corrupt vegetable government, which is a tongue in cheek subversion of a meat-dominated Western diet.Turnip Boy is a sort of cozy roguelike,