Frictions in Cozy Gaming: How Dynamics of Power, Race, and Cultural Flattening Shape World Building in Palia

The emergence of “cozy games” represents a significant shift in video game design, prioritizing comfort, community, and low-stakes interaction. Yet these ostensibly welcoming spaces are not exempt from the cultural forces that shape all digital environments. This paper examines how dynamics of power, race, and culture manifest in Palia , a community-simulation MMORPG that promises inclusive worldbuilding and diverse representation within a cozy framework. Through a mixed-methods approach combining content analysis with ethnographic playthroughs conducted over six months, we analyze Palia ’s governance structures, character design, and cultural events. Our analysis reveals three interconnected dynamics: (1) a system of self-governance that naturalizes surveillance as a condition of narrative progression, (2) ethnic mapping and racial logics that differentially distribute criminalization and sympathy across characters through racialized design cues, and (3) cultural flattening, in which diverse cultural elements—particularly from Chinese and other non-Western traditions—are extracted and reduced to aesthetic signifiers within the game’s worldbuilding. We argue that Palia ’s cozy framework functions as an affective barrier to critique, embedding ideological reproduction within an aesthetic of warmth that discourages interrogation. We offer implications for cozy game design and HCI, including the beginning of a critical analytical framework—organized around character design as racial coding, quest structure as power allocation, seasonal events as cultural hierarchy, and non-choice mechanics as ideological foreclosure—for evaluating comfort-oriented games as sites of cultural and ideological reproduction.