Cozy Games and Resistance Through Care

When Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Nintendo, 2020) came out at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and global lockdowns, it took the world by storm, selling record numbers of copies in the span of a few months (Hernandez, 2020;Khan, 2020).People who had never before considered themselves gamers bought the Nintendo Switch console and devoted countless hours to picking fruit, digging for fossils, decorating their houses and islands, and connecting with friends through the game's world (Fang, 2023;Yee and Sng, 2022;Zhu, 2021).For this reason alone, the pandemic became a crucial moment for digital games.Due to this newfound interest, digital games entered popular discourses not only because of their violence, but as a mature medium that was far more diverse than news would have it.Until then, the focus had primarily been on their violence, their presumed involvement in teenage behavioral issues, and their influence on the shootings in American schools (Kneer and Ward, 2021).The term cozy games was first introduced in the games industry before being adapted by game scholars (Chan et al., 2022;Fang, 2023;Sullivan et al., 2023;Waszkiewicz and Bakun, 2020;Wäppling et al., 2022;Youngblood, 2022), who usually discuss it in relation to ludic, narrative, or aesthetic qualities of games.What is, however, worth emphasizing is that what we understand by cozy games refers to an incredibly broad group of titles which, while usually easily recognizable and classifiable as cozy due to how they look, span across many genres and themes.