I didn’t want to derail the Eikas Postmortem thread, but I have some thoughts about the “cozy” descriptor!
I definitely understand this, but I still personally find it a useful term. A friend has written a great essay about defining what the term actually means (specifically in the context of SFF fiction) if anyone is interested: Cosy SFF: A Comparison Of Definitions | by S.L. Dove Cooper | Medium. The key features she settles on that make something a “cozy” work are:
low but intensely intimate stakes; community; introspection; small-scale settings; an emphasis on empathy; and “happy endings”.
With that definition, I think that Eikas very much fits, and I don’t think that’s at all a bad thing!
I don’t think it’s a bad thing that Eikas is a low-conflict story—the game’s main NPCs are all dealing with internal conflict, and that made it plenty interesting to me! Maybe being able to say the wrong thing sometimes, to inadvertently push someone away or make them mad at you, would make it more realistic, but that could also add an undue amount of stress…
If you ever want to share more thoughts on the term, I’d love to hear them! I get the infantilizing thing; the term can come across like it’s implying a work is pure comfort food and doesn’t have any deeper substance. And I definitely think that’s worth taking into consideration regarding the value of the term. My main point here is just that there are readers who like small-stakes, low-conflict stories, and that Eikas was one that worked well for me.
It’s interesting to compare this game with Ataraxia, a game by the same author that I only recently tried. They have similar mechanics, but Ataraxia adds several distinctly non-cozy elements. So in a way, Ataraxia is Eikas minus coziness. It’d be interesting to see the reactions of people to the two games and how they interacted with the two emotions evoked. I personally found Ataraxia more compelling in terms of ‘I want to know what happens’ whereas Eikas activated the ‘people-pleasing’ centers of my brain.
A cozy story, I guess, can be also a “slice of life” story; but the elements can be part of a definitively not cozy story: let’s call our story “November 1918”: the stakes is defintively not low (surviving the war) but intimate, the community is the one of close-knit squad, time for introspection is plenty, and empathy is strong, not only for the comrades in arms, and the happy ending is implicit, but raising the tension for people whose read Remarque is easy.
I wonder if part of the cosiness is to do with repetitive actions. A game like Lone Survivor is generally not cosy, but also had cosy domestic survival elements.
Cosy also exists as a relative term, to some people anything that doesn’t involve non stop action or life or death stakes is cosy, regardless of the general atmosphere. Staying in your pyjamas all day is either “cosy” or “depressed” depending on how you frame it.
Personally games like stardew valley or similar are not really my cup of tea. If I want to feel cosy I fire up Infra, that game about being a Swedish civil engineer. There’s nothing more cosy than a well funded independent body overseeing public works.
Thank you for this perspective @alyshkalia! As I hope I made clear in my postmortem, my intention wasn’t to critique the term ‘cosy’ in a general sense, just to try and figure out why I seem to have a personal dislike of it. I don’t want to discourage other people from using it if they find it helpful!
@mathbrush Interestingly, Ataraxia gets called ‘cosy’ pretty frequently in reviews despite some of the decidedly un-cosy subject matter, which is maybe part of what turned me off the word in the first place?
Just read your friend’s essay - really brilliant stuff! I never thought of the Wayfarers series in terms of cosy SFF but it makes sense within her definition.
To be honest I think the kind of taxonomy at work here is actually really valuable - I particularly liked this quoted section:
Cozy SFF generally has small stakes, focusing on small moments, not the fate of the world. These lower stakes generally go along with much less onscreen violence in these stories. Another key aspect of cozy SFF is that it focuses on community-building. And finally, cozy SFF honors the importance of domestic labor and other undervalued jobs.
The point about labour is really interesting to me as that’s another theme I’m keen to explore in my work.
Really my beef is just with the word cosy rather than the associated conventions, I just wish there was another term in wide use that doesn’t have the baggage that I feel comes with that specific terminology. ‘Hopeful’, maybe, or even ‘gentle’? I think those could confer a lot of the same meaning without feeling disparaging in the way ‘cosy’ sometimes does to me.
When I was considering this stuff I came across this article about Animal Crossing (which admittedly I haven’t played) that uses the term ‘gentle progression’ to describe a certain type of mechanics, and I thought that was an interesting phrase.
I listen to a reading podcast and their definition of cozy mostly seems to be about what the stories lack. Cozy romance never gets explicit about the sex. Cozy mysteries have the death occur “off screen” and leave out anything gory or gruesome.
But yeah, cozy games often seem both repetitive and often involve a small town/homesteading/farming like Animal Crossing or Littlewood.
Like many genre tags it’s going to be hugely open to interpretation. I’m now flashing back to Last.fm in the early 00s where two people had a daily edit war of changing “Green Day is a punk band” to “Green Day are a pop band” and back. Every day. For months.
There are a lot of things to which I don’t assign words unless it becomes necessary for communication. I have an idea in my head for a kind of thing that might involve repetition and certain kinds of activities, settings, or progressions. Giving things names gives them baggage, and people respond to names in different ways.
When I was a child, my parents were never interested in whether I was bored or not. In retrospect, they could be careless in many ways, and yet it is true that someone can mistake a lack of self-direction or curiosity for boredom. Or, perhaps, for the absence of challenge. I’d like to push back against the idea that games that involve a high amount of self-direction or player-determined objectives lack challenge. There is usually a lot of challenge in so-called “cozy” games, but their spaces are wide and challenge is a thing that must be chosen. I want to build this thing, I want to have this furniture, I want to have a dinner party, what have you.
Now, not all players enjoy making such choices, but those choices are often a product of what might be substantial player agency. In a lot of cases, I think the concern isn’t a lack of challenge, it’s an overabundance of freedom.
Not all “cozy” games have this amount of freedom and self-direction, but the foundational works of the genre seem to.
I kind of accept that also. I think any “cosy” work means it’s something you’ll curl up with understanding the author does not intended to disturb or scare you or gross you out. There may be unexpected surprises but never anything that’s going to make you throw your tea or cover your face with the blanket.
I was suprised on research to find there’s “cosy horror” - Frankenstein and Dracula are considered this - the former written from a very clinical perspective from what I remember, and Dracula is epistolary recounting any visceral events from a distance. I’d bet the book series of True Blood might be considered cosy since it originated more like a romance with lots of character focus, and only the Showtime series amped up the visceral horror elements.
My stepfather actually used to purposely turn on and fall asleep to the original Alien movie every night [1]
which sounds ludicrous since that is considered one of the most scary movies of its time. He had seen it hundreds of times, and when you listen to that movie in the background at reduced volume it’s actually very lulling with its orchestral score and a soundscape that is mostly a lot of low droning and characters mumbling low-key so apart from the occasional quick alien screech it also serves to someone experienced with it as background white noise. ↩︎
I would think this too, but there’s a scene in Ataraxia where an ancient forest entity slices open your guts and climbs inside you and it still gets called cosy on a semi-regular basis, which kinda stumped me.
This is absolutely wild considering Elizabeth is raped violently and murdered by the monster strangling her to death in Frankenstein, and it comes up a lot in feminist analysis of the book.
‘Cozy’ seems so antithetical to the Gothic in particular, but I had to point that out because even with the clinical lens to the story, that’s a totally baffling entry on the list.
I apologize - haven’t read the entirety of Frankenstein, but it was on a list when I was trying to find examples of cosy horror. Maybe they were talking about the black and white movie adaptation, but I think it implies he accidentally kills the little girl which is definilty not cosy.
Here’s a Goodreads list - Dracula is on there, and surprisingly Coraline? - which has cosy elements but was quite disturbing when you consider the implications.
So would “cozy” be a category of its own, then? I’m mostly familiar with it as sub-categories of something else, like “cozy mysteries” being a particular subgenre of the whodunit. Miss Gosling’s Last Case is intended to be one of these, but, well…it starts with someone getting murdered! That’s not what I usually think of for the label “cozy game” without the “mystery” label.
“Hopepunk” may be a useful term! It’s not an exact synonym for the way I think of so-called cozy fiction, but definitely has some commonalities, like the emphasis on community.
Yeah, I think part of the problem with the “cozy” label (and why my friend wrote a whole essay discussing definitions of it!) is that people interpret it so differently. Frankenstein and Coraline would never be cozy to me! (Not super familiar with original Dracula, but from what I know I wouldn’t consider it cozy either…) Likewise with the scene Lauren mentioned. Some people clearly have a very different definition of coziness than I do!
I am definitely most familiar with it being used in this way—cozy [genre], whether mystery, fantasy, sci-fi, or horror. I don’t know anything about the prevalence or usage of “cozy games” as a genre/category, so there’s probably a whole dimension of this topic that I’m completely ignorant on.
I’m unsure if by the (subjective) criteria miss Gosling can be termed, because I don’t feel that getting posthumous justice is a low stake…
so, In my opinion, the co[s|z]ness of a game is a subjective, eye-of-beholder, opinion, in practical terms, I think that is an excellent definition in author’s blurb and player’s review, but should be not an IFdB tag…
Calling Coraline cozy is wild to me, but I guess I can see how visually it aligns with the cartoony, usually hand-drawn (or in this case hand-stop-motion-animated) style that’s strongly associated with “cozy games.”
See, that’s the thing. “Cozy mysteries” often still involve murder, which in real life is a pretty high-stakes thing! But note that even Miss Gosling herself isn’t especially sad about her death, and the emphasis is on the puzzles she’s solving and the whimsy of a dog causing problems on purpose to achieve justice; compare that against something like The Killings in Wasacona or Winter-Over, some distinctly non-cozy mysteries from the comp which focus a lot more on how tragic it is that a life was cut short and the impact it’ll have on everyone around them.
That hits on something really key I think, most ‘cosy’ works that I can think of are pretty whimsical to some degree! Especially when it comes to cosy horror/cosy crime, the tone is probably more key than the content.
