Thank you so much for responding so thoroughly yourself! It gives me so much hope and pleasure to talk seriously with someone about this topic so near and dear to my heart.
I want to begin by acknowledging that I mistook your post, and I apologise for that. I interpreted your post as a response to the I Hate Your Cozy Game and similar jam manifestos, instead of a post in its own right. Much of my framework stemmed from that incorrect interpretation, and I take back those parts of my post. I appreciate the clarification of how I had misinterpreted your post and taken it (unintentionally) in bad faith.
With the additional context, I say that I agree with a significant portion of your post. I, too, have seen the bad faith takes against the "cozy games" genre as a whole, and I disagree with those takes.
I do not think that the "cozy games" genre inherently has less substance or value, or inherently propagates more fascist themes, or inherently offers more escapism than any other genre. I find it mind-boggling that someone can even believe that "cozy games" offer more escapism than a milsim that permits the player to escape into a power fantasy of Shooting All The Evil Guys.
So, thank you so much for setting the record straight. And, thank you so much for responding to me in good faith despite my initial misinterpretation.
Yay for respectful communication! \o/
Also, I want to say that I really appreciate how you chose to format your post. Thank you for starting by establishing explicitly what we agree on and then going through the disagreements. I found your post very straightforward to read and understand, and very pleasing to navigate.
Regarding what we agree on:
1. Yes, we agree that games of all emotional expressions should exist, including positive and hopeful ones. Indeed, I am working on a positive and hopeful game myself, to a point where I explicitly do not want to have any permanent "failure states".
I also agree with you that we are simultaneously responding to a lot of different discussions at once, which can cause some unintentional misfiring on either side. One cannot really focus on thriving if one is focused on surviving. If one has to defend one's existence in the first place, one cannot really improve. To the rightwinger fascist on the internet who believes that marginalized people should not make wholesome games, I will defend to the death the right of every "cozy game" to exist, whether or not I personally like that game. But, when I am amongst like-minded developers trying to make better games, I will critique the genre conventions. I think we align on this!
>"The concept that we shouldn't blindly adapt past games/ tropes/ modern societal structures without examining the purpose or messaging it inflicts. We may disagree on specifics of implementation, or what concepts should always be subverted and how. 100% agree that a game that you feel is endorsing capitalism or fascism is not comforting or cozy"
Very well said. I agree with everything here, other than the use of the word blindly. (I am not trying to be pedantic! I just didn't want a third-party observer to misread my intentions here. I would not use the word blindly in a negative fashion here, as blindness is not inherently synonymous with ignorance. I would say that we should not ignorantly or without thinking adapt past games/tropes/modern societal structures.)
Where we disagree about specifics of implementation, or what concepts should always be subverted and how, fuels the very discussion that excites me most. I love to discuss specific mechanics and open my mind up to different possibilities, interpretations, and implementations than I had ever considered!
I definitely have seen games make serious efforts, to varying degrees of success, to subvert propagation of such values and implement better ones. I would also love to see more discussion of games that do try to change things and how. I love reading the comments on The Game Where You Let People Starve, because commentators have provided different recommendations for games which try to propagate different values to varying degrees of success.
As in my manifesto, ALIENS DON'T SPEAK ENGLISH, I tried to talk about where different games tried different specific mechanical implementations and briefly analyzed what worked and what didn't. If I have time, I would love to do the same for "cozy games" of a specific subsubgenre (such as the subsubgenre of "decorating game" or subsubgenre of "shop simulation"), to go over games and really dig into specific mechanics.
Now that you mention it, I do wish that I had brought up positive examples in KILL COZY GAMES, because I do have some positive examples. At the time, I was just trying to word-vomit my thoughts before the jam ended, and I didn't anticipate that I would have time to write another manifesto, much less refine the first.
But I would love to talk about specific positive examples and how they failed or succeeded in different ways!
Now onto the further discussions!
>"I don't want to harp too much on my perception of cozy games discourse, because I think I get easily distracted from actually furthering the discussion."
Very fair!
>"I'll say that I do not perceive many anti cozy games posts as wanting to improve the genre, but being against it entirely."
Yes, I think that I have seen the anti cozy games posts that you are referring to, now that I understand the scope. I have definitely seen takes which amount to saying that cozy games should not exist at all, with which I disagree.
>"My perception reading yours was not like that, though I still perceived it as generally being against the group as a whole, or being associated with it (which you explained valid personal reasons for!)."
I acknowledge that I went with a very clickbait title of KILL COZY GAMES. I did not intend to make a clickbait title. When I was writing that manifesto, I simply genuinely had that thought in my head and so wrote it that. I guess that I should work on my own tendency to summarise my thoughts in an exaggerated title, when that does not necessarily align with what I am trying to say.
The cozy game subsubgenre that I care most about comes in the form of the cooking game or food/beverage service sim. I had just recently played the demo for Burger Bois, an excellent game that I look forward to playing, which has some innovative mechanics about which I would love to gush. However, Burger Bois still contains wealth accumulation as a desirable metric, which made me seethe and inspired me to write that post.
I have to admit that my own experience with game development includes a lot of rejecting labels. I have found that, in general, I struggle to mesh with community who self-identify with specific labels, because I often end up chafing against the members of those groups. I recognise this as a "me-issue". But, for example, I used to belong to a lot of so-called "feminist" circles and then ended up stepping away from those due to the rampant transmisogyny/antiblackness/settler-colonialism. When I would bring up critiques, people would shut me down as failing to act as a feminist ally, and that I should shut up and stay in my lane.
I still very much fight for gender equity and the end of the violence of gender, but I do not self-identify as "feminist", because I do not want to signal that I endorse those ideas, which I have found even amongst people who call themselves "intersectional feminists".
Now, instead of seeking labels, I aim to think about specific frameworks, specific issues, specific praxes, rather than theoreticals. I still work alongside many people who self-identify as "feminist" or who work for/in "feminist organisations", especially in labour organisation or trying to enact local change.
But I digress. It makes me genuinely happy that you have had positive experiences with the community of cozy devs. I am not against "the community" or any community as a whole, insomuch that I have seen enough harrassment/bullying/protection of bullies that I do not personally really want to participate in "the community" at large.
I also find that, when I do raise critiques, I tend to have people tell me that I am being racist/misogynistic/transphobic/etc., like the other commentator on my post.
>"I think the reason I want to step away from that, is that in my experience with the community of cozy devs, every one of them that I've met agrees with all the critique and wants to improve it. We just may be better or worse at that implementation, or even more or less well read about the subjects."
I love that. It heartens me to hear that. I love that! And I hope to continue to discourse about implementations.
>"But I do subjectively perceive the discussion to usually sound like "These people aren't trying to subvert this, and they don't align with my ethics", instead of "This game attempted, but did not successfully subvert this". The purpose of that difference is that if we understand most cozy devs already have these ideas and are trying them, then we can argue about how to do that."
I agree with you, and I appreciate the specific example of wording. I will try to make sure that my wording aligns better with my internal beliefs, because I do think that many of these games at least attempt to subvert such beliefs.
>"I think this is where the difference between something like cozy games, and something like FPSes are different. FPS games as a genre are the establishment. Cozy games are almost entirely indie right now, at most, third party, and then some smaller AAA. For perspective, actually top end AAA games tend to have teams of 500+ to 1000+ people. A bunch of them were legit funded by the US military. There are great examples too! But people generally separate it into AAA status quo, and indie subversions. The major examples of cozy games are almost all attempting to subvert something, probably due to the genre coming up itself as a response to the industry."
True. You bring up very good points.
>"So I think a harsh general statement instead should be "Cozy games want to be anti-capitalist (or other themes), but fail at it in execution"."
I don't think that I agree with this point because I feel like it paints cozy games as a monolith. Games like Animal Crossing are not trying to be anti-capitalist. You yourself pointed out that we should not paint cozy games, an entire genre, as fascist. I also do not think that we should paint cozy games, an entire genre, as trying to be anti-capitalist, or anything.
Cozy games, like any other genre, arise from pluralities of peoples with pluralities of truths and pluralities of beliefs. There are cozy games made by people who are trying and variously failing/succeeding at anti-capitalism/anti-fascism/anti-colonialism, and there are cozy games made by unironic fascists, and everything in-between.
The same holds true for FPSes. There are explicitly anti-capitalist/anti-fascist/anti-colonialist FPSes, too.
I do not think that all "cozy games" try to subvert the mainstream, even. Again, we do have big popular titles such as The Sims or Animal Crossing in the mix, too. But I do think that we ought to acknowledge that very little of the AAA space devotes any time or energy to "cozy games".
>"I'm definitely aware that this specific argument is splitting hairs and getting way too specific in directing critique, just that I do think it's a more productive place to start from if we acknowledge that most cozy devs I've met are already aligned in trying to subvert, but as a collective haven't had enough actionable critique and discourse about specifics."
I at least agree that most cozy devs are trying to do better. It makes me happy to see that we can complain about not enough diversity or poorly implemented diversity, as opposed to trying to convince people that diversity matters at all.
However, I have also seen cozy game devs unironically making comments such as (paraphrased to avoid people copying into google and finding the dev in question), "I chose not to include any disabled people in my game because disability is not cozy to me," "I chose to have all of humanity deceased in my game because I think that human nature is inherently evil and that nature would be better off with humans gone," "A cozy game should be full of beautiful, attractive, fluffy images, so I did not want to include fat people," and so on. Obviously, I do not agree with these takes! But, I do think that many of the people working in the cozy game space carry harmful beliefs.
(I think that every single person on this planet, including myself, carries harmful beliefs, that we have rejected to various degrees and in various ways. I still carry misogynistic, racist, colonialist, etc. beliefs myself, but of course I am doing my utmost to acknowledge and reject those beliefs. Rejection takes endless work and will never end. But, I believe that, if we all work to reject such beliefs over our lifetimes, that future generations will have fewer such beliefs indoctrinated into them less strongly, which will make the work of rejection easier and easier over time.)
I think, partly, you and I are seeing and responding to what sounds like different parts of this very large and diverse group of developers.
>"Trying to convince devs to worry about this content isn't I think a helpful topic, since pretty much all of them already thing this, but it's more that our collective imagination or even just game design skills are lacking in execution. So instead we argue "The way you are trying to do this isn't working""
As you said earlier, I think that we are having many different discussions. One discussion is, "I want to convince cozy game developers that diversity is important and fascism is bad." I think that it would waste my time and yours to have that discussion, because you and I already agree on this. The other discussion, the one that you articulated so well there, is "The cozy game developers I am speaking to and about already think that fascism is bad, so let's think about how to improve our collective imagination and game design skills to align our mechanics with our values."
I am now going to stop talking about the "part of the cozy game development space that espouses fascist values", and focus on the discussion of the "part of the cozy game development space that wants to stop propagating fascist values in its work". I also think that both you and I (and everyone else talking about this) would benefit from not treating "cozy games" or "cozy game developers" as monoliths.
>""Show me the person who said that comforting games should not exist. " It's definitely possible that I misinterpreted various critiques, hard to say for sure. Also hard given the usual brevity of takes on shortform spaces like Bluesky."
No, I take this back. I definitely think that some people believe that comforting games should not exist. As I said, I had misinterpreted the framework/context of your original statement.
>"As for manifestos, it's hard for me to be able to tell if a declarative statement is meant to be more extreme than their actual belief. With yours, the title was "kill cozy games", but I was easily able to tell from the contents that you meant "Kill the type of cozy game I describe here"."
Thank you for taking my statement in good faith. It means a lot to me.
>"Throughout my long time as a dev I've seen a lot of really directed anger at the concept of a cozy game altogether. I ignore the ones from people I'm not aligned with at all, but I've also seen a lot from people who are my peers in indie games, specifically calling them twee and devoid of substance as a genre. Sorry, I notice I'm talking in circles around this point, because I agree with you that you can make a general statement like "cozy games need to stop making me cut down forests". I guess I'll just say that has been my perception in game dev circles. It's possible we're also seeing different stuff! I've legit read basically every Cozy games take imaginable at this point, and the ones I'm picturing could have different context from the ones you are picturing."
I agree with everything that you said here. It makes me glad that you and I, who have had such different experiences in the cozy game space, can have a discussion like this. Sincerely, thank you.
I will also say that I spend a lot of time in non-English cozy game spaces, and those tend to have very different vibes (in many different ways) than English ones. I stay away from social media such as bsky or discord entirely, so I am mostly seeing discussions stemming from textboards, forums, and developer interviews/curation groups/etc., which have different vibes as well.
>"I haven't either! I realize that my manifesto came across as reactionary to the jam, genuinely I was just writing about my longstanding thoughts and reactions from years in the space. There's currently a lot of discourse over content warnings and triggers, not even just in games. One of my fav creators Princess Weekes had a vid about it just recently."
Yeah, I agree completely! I appreciate the examples, and I have absolutely seen plenty of hatred for safety railings and content warnings over the years. I can see what you were responding to now, and I 100% concur with your defense of these practices! Thank you for articulating that defense.
>"Mainly in my own spaces, the discourse revolves around the need for sustainable emotional energy and safety, vs. trying to push against the type of people who ignore the news so that they don't have to actually do anything, and people who are doing both for different topics."
Agree.
Onto the details, which most excites me to discuss. I am rubbing my little hands together, especially when we get into the weeds of specific implementation. I hope that, now that we have cleared up from where we each are coming, we can focus more on those implementation discussions. ^^
>"At the point where we start talking about fascism, I think we start branching into different ethos's and ideas of implementation! -Imagine a game about running a shop in a post-racial cleansing world where everyone is white and able-bodied. The creator could say, "I just wanted to make a make similar to my life, but with a lot of the traumas of racial cleansing removed." / I agree with this, I think it's going to be specific to implementation and intent. Fantasy generally has an issue of what it chooses to ground and what it doesn't, and how. I think, if certain bad things are kept, that they be used for commentary and subversion."
I agree. I appreciate the articulation. I completely agree that bad things can exist in games for commentary and subversion.
For example, a game (even a cozy game) can include racism or queeprhobia, if it uses those for commentary and subversion. I would not want a cozy game to include queerphobia or racism unchallenged or viewed as a good thing. But, I have played many powerful games that include racism or queerphobia to demonstrate something about it, including the need to fight against internalised forms of it.
I do not think that cozy games need to close their eyes against the realities of capitalism, just that I do not want cozy games to glorify those realities or view those values as desirable.
The cozy game which rewards the player for chopping down infinite trees propagates those fascist values as desirable, just like a game that rewards the player for queerphobia, for example. That differs from the game which includes queerphobia in order to portray it as negative. I think we align on this.