A short meditation on cozy games

There’s a game on Steam, Easy Delivery Co., which puts the player in the shoes of an anthropomorphic cat. The player does deliveries between neighborhoods whilst battling the elements and delivery deadlines. In the early stages of the game, the main character has to find their way in a blizzard where staying out of his truck even for a brief moment risks getting frozen.

Go ask Google, read gaming blogs, or lurk around related subreddits and you’ll discover the overwhelming consensus that it’s a cozy game that provides the players a light and relaxing experience. Something to tune into after a day of work. Sit on your couch and drive around in the snow for a couple of hours. Do your daily deliveries trying to hit your quota for the day in a snowstorm.

I’ve done this job, albeit not while driving a truck, but on a cargo bike for more than two years now. I’ve battled the heat, the snow and the endless rain showers of Amsterdam. I must confess, cozy isn’t how I’d describe this line of work.

Reading the interviews with the game’s solo developer, I get the impression that he himself isn’t exactly familiar with this kind of job. I get the feeling that he’s never worked as a delivery worker in his life. Yet, the game has certain moments that I know all too well from doing delivery work: the strange loneliness of the empty streets, the tedium of being on the road and the struggle to keep warm in winter. The familiarity of such scenes in a game brings my heart a strange warmth, like someone has finally cared to look at my life and see it the way I do. That being said, I feel uneasy when people label that kind of experience as cozy.

The disconnect between the lived human experience versus its depictions has always been a fundamental weakness of this medium. Perhaps it is the impossibility of perfectly imparting an experience from one person to the other—only made more difficult through the screen in between—as we are ultimately locked up in our own minds. Or perhaps it’s the fact that everything in a game has to serve the gameplay, and depicting delivery work as the dehumanizing and alienating drudgery as it really is doesn’t bring much fun.

I suspect the real reason might have more to do with who makes these games.

Reading his words, the developer of Easy Delivery Co. sounds like your average white-collar solo developer. I’m not sure if ConcernedApe, the developer of Stardew Valley has ever worked in a farm either. Both games represent an image of menial labour put together by exclusively white-collar developers and artists. They share with the Western society at large a certain disregard and indifference on a fundamental level towards the nature of menial labour. They’re simply clueless.

This is where I take you to an article by Niko Stratis. In “Imitations of Life” Niko writes about how menial labor has come to be called “cozy” in the gaming world. She points out how odd it is that these games in which menial labor (be it in a farm or tending a garden etc.) and the drudgery that comes with it are depicted with such detail and they’re so central to the gameplay, and yet people find comfort and relaxation in them. Going back to Niko’s words:

“On the internet, I see people post threads complaining about the work men are doing on their building, or in the streets near them. The complaints are always understandable in their own way. It’s hard to hear the sounds of drilling, and hammering, and the reverberations of noise that is often painful. I never see consideration for the men doing the work. They are only ever a burden, they are a hinderance.”

This is the prevalent attitude towards physical labour. There are many facets to this: the greater focus put on white-collar or the tech-focused work within our industries, the fact that delivery work is basically the bottom of the rung with the lowest base salary (based on the deliberate misconception that delivery work doesn’t require skill) and the absolutely humongous pay gap between these professions are more than enough as proof.

Tedious labor is necessary (remember when the global community called delivery personnel “essential workers” during COVID times?), but to think the work itself brings some sort of inner peace to people who do it is simply a twisted white-collar misconception.

It’s baffling how the notion of cozy has been conflated with any activity that might require dull repetition. Watering a few dozen plants every in-game day in Stardew Valley is not cozy, though some (occasionally myself included) might find a zen-like state in doing so. It’s dull and that kind of gameplay is anathema to the fundamentals of game design. In fact, it’s remarkably similar to going on delivery rounds for hours on a cargo bike in terms of how mind-numbing it can be. The alienating loneliness of being alone on the streets while surrounded by the warm yellow lights that come out of houses is heartbreaking to me. The mindlessness of it all is conflated with cozy, as if cozy is something devoid of all thought or purpose.

I think I know what cozy might look like.

I remember a particular moment from my youth that I hold dear to my heart to this day. I was in my early twenties and it was after an evening of drinking and socializing when a bunch of us close friends decided to end the night in a small student apartment. Drunk, exhausted and relieved at the end of a difficult academic year, we huddled together on the double mattress that took up most of the room. As people slowly drifted into sleep whilst Leonard Cohen was crooning in the background, I couldn’t take my eyes off this beautiful scene. Friends, sleeping peacefully in each other’s arms, leaving the hard work and many heartbreaks of the past year behind. Nothing could live up to the calm and peace of that moment well into my late thirties. To be in the arms of a loved one, the protection and the warmth made that moment cozy.

Physical labor such as delivering packages in a snowstorm is decidedly un-cozy. It’s dull. These days, the only antidote to that soul-crushing drudgery is the sight of my toddler sleeping in his crib. In terms of cozy, it’s second to none.

I can only think of one game that occasionally has brief moments of such coziness: Space Haven. Colony simulators are rarely zen-like, considering their primary focus on survival. Space Haven is no exception: your handful of space colonists struggle to keep their ramshackle spaceship afloat, squeezing every bit of value out of scarce resources they find in the vastness of cold space. It’s naturally a narrative of harsh survival, especially in higher difficulties when failure to optimize every step of the logistics chain can send the player into a death spiral.

And yet, when the shift is over and the pixellated colonists go to their bunkbeds, a familiar sense of peace descends upon their barracks. As they try to rid their minds and bodies from the sheer terror of being in the outer space, having barely survived yet another day, they seem to exude in their sleep a sense of peace that I haven’t seen in any other game. The low humming of the machinery that surrounds them is a quiet lullaby, like Cohen’s song from some twenty years ago. They’ve survived the cold, the hunger, and whatever horror the outer space has thrown at them. Now they sleep. Huddled in a small room, these handful of survivors are crammed into this steel can drifting in the darkness. They hope to one day find themselves a home, but until then, the warmth that emanates from their bunk buddies is what keeps them safe.