Kyle Chayka on the “cozy gaming” trend, evidenced in games like Stardew Valley, Vampire Therapist, and Wylde Flowers, which seeks to swath us in a digital and physical cocoon.
Cozy gaming has become not just a social-media genre but a life style. The trend can be traced back to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nintendo released the latest iteration of its Animal Crossing series, in March of 2020, just in time for quarantined players to hide away as they built cutesy, cartoonish islands populated by anthropomorphized creatures and shared them with one another.
The game, which has sold nearly fifty million copies to date, became emblematic of pandemic escapism, offering a kind of parallel virtual society in which interaction was still possible. Around the same time, a law student named Kennedy started posting videos of herself playing Animal Crossing and other, similarly soothing games, under the name @cozy.games, eventually accumulating six hundred thousand followers on TikTok and countless imitators. Kennedy has the requisite office chair and wide wooden desk, but she also plays games, and reads, in a lounge chair complete with a body pillow and a chunky knit blanket that her cat lays atop. The cozy style is made up of “warm lighting, natural materials, soft textures, and, most importantly, knickknacks that make you happy,” Kennedy told me recently. “Coziness is that warm glow of peace and safety.” Even as the threat of COVID-19 receded, the popularity of cozy content has continued to grow, helping to preserve some of the housebound, self-cosseted mood of quarantine for a world now buffeted by economic instability, international conflict, and political upheaval. Cozy gaming is “reassuring during turbulent times,” Kennedy said. A few days after Trump’s victory in the 2024 Presidential election, she posted a video of herself throwing down a newspaper, screaming, and retreating to her desk to play the Sims. The caption read, “my daily routine until further notice😌” Meditative video games such as the Sims or Minecraft have long offered players a form of immersive escapism into worlds of their own making. Stardew Valley, with its now famous pixelated barns and crops, was first released in the twenty-tens, a decade that also saw the rise of hygge, a Scandinavian stylized coziness to combat the darker seasons. Luxury candles and weighted blankets became millennial status symbols. But the popularity of #cozygaming represents a new ideal of technologically enabled self-soothing, both onscreen and off. The world-weary pursuit of comfort has filtered from video games to other forms of gadgetry and entertainment, with each new video and accessory designed to foster a sensory environment of unrelenting harmoniousness. As the physical world becomes more alienating, we build ourselves benign parallel universes to burrow into. The archetypal cozy bedroom becomes a form of virtual reality. For all the anxieties surrounding the advent of artificial intelligence—the threat of deepfakes, the surge in bot spam—A.I. technology has also ushered in visions of sweetly humanoid devices that adjust themselves to our personal preferences. On Apple TV+’s gently techno-dystopian mystery series “Sunny,” released this year, Rashida Jones plays a woman named Suzie opposite a feminine robot named Sunny, whose huge, spherical head features a face glowing forth from a screen like an emoji sprung to life. Sunny is the creation of Suzie’s husband, who died under ambiguous circumstances, leaving her alone in their life in Kyoto. “I was programmed for you,” the robot tells her during their slapstick detective quest to find out what really happened to him. Suzie’s home is cozily warm and insulated, filled with funky furniture that she lies around on in a haze of grief, swathed in soft, thick fabrics. She often gazes at her phone, a rounded, blue device that has the plastic texture and saturated hue of a Playmobil toy. Sunny initially speaks in an obsequious ChatGPT-generic tone, but the robot gradually adopts Suzie’s speech patterns, softening Suzie’s initial skepticism. Suzie and Sunny sit together on the couch, watching TV like snug domestic companions. In one scene, Sunny cuddles into bed with Suzie to comfort her, emitting fake breathing sounds. A.I. is something intimate and tactile, the show seems to promise, capable of lulling a user into acceptance by emulating human traits. The user is coddled by the machine, voluntarily infantilized. The first generation of actual A.I. devices is adopting the cozy aesthetic, too. These devices have organic names—Rabbit, Humane, Friend. Like Sunny, they are playfully designed, compact, and blob-like, unthreatening and trusty confidants. Humane’s Web site describes its product as an “intelligent, voice-powered wearable companion”; it’s a pin that gazes outward from your chest and analyzes the world with its camera. Friend, the creation of Avi Schiffmann, a twenty-two-year-old entrepreneur, is a necklace hung with a plastic orb, with a light embedded at its center to represent its “soul,” Schiffmann told me recently. Scheduled for release early next year, it uses A.I. to process conversations and sounds around you, and then it texts you its observations about whatever is happening, whether you’re going through a breakup, hiking in the woods, or getting a promotion at work. It’s a “superintelligent, omnipresent entity that you talk to with no judgment in the most intimate way,” Schiffmann said. Friend swaddles its user in protective surveillance. Schiffmann’s inspiration for the Friend product included his childhood encounters with games and animated shows from the nineties—Tamagotchi, Pokemon, Digimon—which featured little creatures who follow their owners around. The design of Friend recalls the Digivice from Digimon, a handheld gadget with buttons, antennae, and a tiny screen on which a user’s digital companions appear, before they are summoned by the Digivice out of the digital world and into the real one. Like the Pokemon trainers of yore, the modern adult A.I. user who ventures out into the wider world can draw comfort from knowing she’s never really alone. Social media in its original form reflected an urge to connect with other people living their lives somewhere else in the real world. The coziness trend suggests that the Internet and artificial intelligence can lead us ever inward. In the cozy era, our screens and the related accoutrements of digital life fulfill all of our emotional and sensory needs. Stef Kight, a journalist in the D.C. area, and a fan of cozy content, told me that the trend is connected, in her mind, with a TikTok mantra: Romanticize your life. As she put it, “Let’s romanticize even the most insular, habitual things that we do. We can still make it enjoyable and aesthetically pleasing and comfortable.” Last winter, Kight hosted a reading retreat for her book club, gathering twenty women in two plush houses in Virginia to read and discuss books amid a snow-covered landscape—another aestheticized act of coziness, though a notably social one. By contrast, the archetypal cozy figure at her desk, plugged into multiple screens, is an image of loneliness which is also meant to assuage loneliness. #Coziness, in a way, stylizes isolation, making it look desirable. This is an old paradox of the digital world: the same platforms that provide connection also have a way of cutting us off. But #cozygaming suggests that the solution is to surround yourself with yet more gadgets and devices, whether an ergonomic Aeron desk chair, a video projector that turns your wall into a scene from “Harry Potter,” or a new A.I. companion who follows your every move. As Friend’s Avi Schiffmann told me, “I do think the loneliness crisis was created by technology, but I do think it will be fixed by technology.” Within the cozy games and the footage of people playing them, though, there seems to be a desire for something beyond the screen, the sorts of physical experiences hinted at by the games’ analog subject matter—farming, potion-mixing, construction. Similarly, A.I. products answer a yearning for social interaction and the comfort of community with a simulacrum thereof, a machine friend who never needs anything from you in return. Eleanor, a young British gamer, got into cozy content creation on TikTok under the username @cozy.eleanor after dropping out of college and moving home to her parents’ farm, outside of Cambridge, to deal with chronic illness. She turned to games such as Stardew Valley and Life Is Strange, an interactive narrative about American adolescence, in part because they offered tangible forms of achievement during a stalled time in her life. “Video games for me have been a savior,” she told me. In a recent video, titled “lazy sunday evenings 🍂☕,” Eleanor sits in dim, warm light at her desk, where she plays Animal Crossing on her Switch, crochets, and completes a page from a coloring book while watching a Studio Ghibli animated film on her monitor. A lit candle glimmers next to the screen and a vase of flowers decorates the desk. Her accessories—keyboard, mouse, controllers—are tucked away into neat cubbies. Turning her childhood bedroom into a zone of maximal coziness—including, recently, with the addition of a white Aeron chair—was a way of asserting control. “I don’t see a lot of progress in my day-to-day life getting better, so seeing the progress of arranging my desk, it was like a physical progressing,” Eleanor said. Her surroundings are “immersive,” she continued, “you’re keeping the vibe going”; the outside world is kept at bay. Beyond the walls of the house, her parents run a farm with real chickens and ducks and fields of wheat. Eleanor knows that the cozy aesthetic is a fantasy, just as role-playing games and neighborhoods of anthropomorphized creatures are fantasies. It is ultimately an expression of alienation, an indulgence in the kinds of unreality that technology excels at providing. She said, of the agricultural life, with all its physicality and mess, “The reality, for people who play farming Sims, would not appeal quite so much.” ♦
Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) Cozy V.R.
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