Why Are All Cozy Games About Work?

This guest post is written by Mara Franzen.

If you’ve been on any gaming or hobby sites in the last few years, it’s likely that you’ve seen the rise of “cozy games.” These games tend to be marketed towards women, and they’re focused on lower-stakes gameplay — often with “easy” mechanics. Games like this have existed for nearly as long as video games have, but as more things are marketed as “cozy”, it’s become clear that this burgeoning market is snowballing.

There can be a lot of room for interpretation when it comes to what counts as a “cozy video game,” but for simplicity, I’m going to be focusing on games that are specifically marketed as “cozy” upon release or have been near-universally dubbed a cozy game by the internet. The title “cozy game” usually applies when they have a low learning curve, no threat of death, and limited combat, if any. At their core, they are about letting you unwind and take the game at your own pace.

There is also one specific aspect that a lot of cozy games have in common: Games like “Tiny Bookshop,” “Animal Crossing,” “Stardew Valley,” and “Strange Horticulture” are about running a successful business and/or making money.

Using one of the all-time coziest games as an example, let’s look at “Animal Crossing.” You play as a human who moves to an island full of talking animals. It becomes your responsibility to level up the island, build homes, attract businesses, and beautify it with terraforming to reach a five-star island. You do this by using in-game currency called Bells and Nook Miles, so as you play, you are often grinding to earn Bells to buy the required decorations to reach your five-star goal.

Loans and interest are also mechanics in the game. That includes a stock market where you invest in turnips to try to sell for a profit. In the DLC, you even get hired as a vacation home designer being paid with a currency called “Poki,” and in the recent update, you are also volunteered to assist in the completion of a hotel, where you are paid in yet another form of in-game currency.

Similarly, in “Stardew Valley,” you play as someone who inherited a decrepit farm, and you strive to make it beautiful and profitable so you can get more money to buy more crops, unlock upgrades, and “fix up” the town on your dime.

Newer games have exploded onto the scene like “Little Bookshop” and “Strange Horticulture,” where the main objective of the game is to run a successful business, in this case, a bookstore and a plant shop, respectively.

So why is this a thing? Why are so many “cozy games” dependent on you performing labor? Why, after a long day of work, do so many people log in to do more pretend work as a way to unwind? And why are these games full of labor marketed specifically to women?

Well, it’s all the same answer.

A lot of the workforce now is made up of people whose entire job is sitting at a computer. The only proof of our labor is that numbers in a spreadsheet somewhere trend upwards, and if we have a good management team, we might be lucky enough to get a kind word from a team lead. Unless you are employed as a skilled craftsman or a blue-collar worker, it’s rare you get to see physical evidence of your work. It’s even more rare nowadays that consistent hard work leads to consistent raises and promotions, leaving us feeling underappreciated and like we are wasting our efforts on things that don’t matter for not enough money.

In the real world, even if you work hard, you are always in danger of lay-offs, of your company restructuring, or of getting bought out by private equity firms who will run the business into the ground and strip it for parts. Our paychecks feel lighter every year due to wages not keeping up with inflation, or we work hard waiting tables just to have a night of terrible tips.

This is especially true for women, who still make less on average than their male counterparts. Women are also often still expected to provide invisible labor in their own homes for no reward. So, why do so many people, after a long day of work, then go and play games all about work? Because these games actually leave us feeling appreciated.

We work hard as a farmer in “Stardew Valley,” and the Community Center gets rebuilt as a direct result of our efforts. We play these games, and we unlock more things for our island, our shop, or our home. NPCs in the game thank us, celebrate us, and tell us how much our efforts are appreciated. Even though they are just pixels reciting a script, it feels good to hear. Not only that, but we are often actually fairly compensated for our labor.

At the end of a long day of feeling unappreciated at our jobs or in our homes, we get to turn on a game that actually rewards us. We complete a task, and get our money. We do something well, and we get a reward. We see direct improvements based on our performance. There might be strategic setbacks built into the game, but they are also designed to be overcome.

We finally feel recognized.

We want to feel appreciated, well-compensated, and in control. Cozy games offer all those things while often demanding little from our already overtaxed brains.

So, if you’re feeling undervalued, under-compensated, or like your work is getting you nowhere, maybe pick up a cozy game and escape to a world where your good actions have tangible consequences. Just don’t forget that if we want the world to feel like a cozy game, we have to actually demand that we are all treated fairly and compensated adequately in the real world.

Image Credit: Zoe Richardson