Cozy games have grown into a genre of their own, and for good reason. These are games that were made to take the crippling weight of real life off your back, giving each player a sense of escape from it all.
Each player can find their cozy cubby from games like Powerwash Simulator to the abundant Stardew Valley clone, but for some reason, it just doesn’t work for me. Which is weird considering I’m at the age where most people would want to start slowing down, but sadly, I got that dog in me. And oh boy is he tired.
So allow me to take you on a journey as I examine why cozy games don’t work for me.
Fake Productivity
I have this nagging thought in my head every time I see a simulator-type game that’s meant to be cozy: If I can powerwash in a video game, why don’t I just powerwash in real life?
This, of course, breaks immersion almost immediately to the point where, instead of being cozy and finding my rhythm, I fall into a bubbling pool of guilt. I’m aware that this feeling often occurs in people who are workaholics and that it’s not just tied to cozy video games, but it’s here where I feel it the most.
The productivity in video games is only fake if you look at it with the wrong definition of productivity. I absolutely hate that the gauge of productivity is being based solely on the quality of the output, and it’s this mindset that is at the core of my guilt. But if we look at it from a more holistic point of view, cozy video games may bring the most valuable output in this day and age: Peace of mind. Whether it be playing a nice farming, fishing, or random gas station cashier simulator, the peace of mind that these cozy video games give you is just as important as any other high-priority task.
Why So Serious?
So now that we’ve finally disproved the guilt of fake productivity in cozy video games, we now have to see what happens when the pendulum swings too far back into the other direction. What happens when someone takes a cozy video game a little too seriously? I’m a competitive guy by nature, and I’ve accepted that! A part of me will always want to be the best Tekken player, the best Counter-Strike 2 player, and…I won’t even dare to step into Faker’s territory. But as fun as being competitive is in video games, it has no place being in cozy video games, and I wish someone could have told me that sooner.
Flash back to the days when I still played farming simulators like Stardew Valley, Coral Island, and even Animal Crossing, and how I would end up crashing and burning through each playthrough. Instead of actually relaxing and building my farm at my own peaceful pace, I ended up stressing over every single coin or crop that I missed. Even my lovely mother, the biggest Animal Crossing fan I know, has sunk close to a thousand hours in the game and still stresses over island redecorations every season. At least now I know where I got it from.
Finding My Cozy
For a while, I convinced myself that fighting games were my cozy games, and they still are. As I’ve written before, video games can help players reach a flow state and help relieve a lot of stress, but that doesn’t change the fact that these are still stressful games. Any stress relief I get from playing games that I love, like Elden Ring, Resident Evil, or Tekken 8, is all immediately returned tenfold because these games are just plain stressful. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve decided to log on to Tekken 8 after a long day to blow off some steam, but then immediately get tilted after a single loss. Things need to change.
So after a ton of trial and error to find the actual cozy game that works for me, I’ve finally landed on my favorite genre: friendslop. Humans are social creatures, and we love laughing and talking to our friends after a long day of work just to unwind. Doing this in, let’s say, a REPO server in the middle of the night, is just as effective as meeting up outside for a drink to catch up. The same could be said for other virtual spaces like Roblox and the recently released On Together.
So the next time you find yourself stressing out over real life and looking for an escape, take some time off and go visit your virtual farm to pet your virtual chickens. And if that doesn’t work, well, maybe it’s time to go touch some virtual grass with your friends.
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