Stardew Valley And The Commodification of "Cozy" Gaming
...or how I learned to stop caring and find coziness in everything.
For this month's article, I've replaced my shotgun with a gardening hoe. My good friend and supporter Kaia has requested I talk about the farming simulator that took the gaming world by storm: Stardew Valley.
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When my friend approached me to write about the one game she's been playing non-stop for a few months, she stated a frank excitement for my take, "even if it was disparaging". I don't blame her for this preconception of my gaming opinions – take a gander at any of my other articles or my 2023 roundup and you can see the majority of the games I enjoy are rather violent and skill-based. There seems to be no room in my videogame backlog for a "cozy" experience.
That's the main term associated with Stardew Valley: warm, fuzzy comfort. Coziness. Its premise does little to defend itself against such allegations. You abandon a dead-end job as a corporate shill to take care of some prime real estate: a farm you inherited from your (deceased) grandfather. At first, you find the land in disarray. The farm has been grown over with grass, trees and rocky debris. This sparks the start of your cottage-core dreams. Farm, fish or make out with the town hottie. The Valley is your new home, where nothing bad ever happens.
I have very few criticisms of Stardew Valley. It's probably the best farming simulator in the market. I've played it on and off with friends throughout the years – it's an especially good game to gift to the non-gamer in your life. Its simple farming, social and combat mechanics hide a truly varied experience that can attract anyone. It's cute, charming and colorful – it's a very easy game to love if you are willing to slide into it.
What I am critical of is Stardew's culpability in the rise of the term "cozy gaming". I mean, what even is "coziness" as an experience and aesthetic to strive for? What is "cozy gaming" to someone like me, who already uses videogames to unwind or to confront the brutal reality of our times? "Cozy gaming" seems to be nothing more than a marketing term – a commodified word to advertise certain games that promise a certain experience or aesthetic.
I've been playing Stardew Valley for 5+ years, with big intervals in between my sessions, mostly spurred by my friends' fluctuating interest and the frequent updates, many of which add oodles of new and interesting content. Stardew is like Minecraft in the fact the solitary experience quickly grows boring and uninteresting, but playing it with friends always retains fun through its social element. Both games owe their massive success to mass appeal. Hardcore gamers were playing it, girlfriends who never once touched a game controller were playing it – hell, even your grandma could love this game.
Its open-ended design allows you to engage with whatever gameplay mechanic you enjoy. This is another advantage of multiplayer: it allows you to split tasks and avoid the chores you least want to do. Tired of watering the plants? Reach consensus with your friends and go off to the mines instead. Some of your friends will be more interested in molding the farm into an elegantly adorned villa than they will ever touching or planting a seed. Others will forgo meeting the villagers entirely, focusing instead on maximizing crop yield for profit. They will spend days optimizing irrigation and crop layout. They will be the main reason why you're all not indigent and penniless at the end of each day. The green-thumb is the moneymaker – the gardener has more than one green on his mind.
My favorite activities in Stardew Valley are, in loose order, fishing, mining and ranching. I love fishing only because I hate socializing with the villagers and like to roleplay as a grumpy old fisherman (plus it makes pretty decent money). I enjoy ranching because I can give my chickens cute nicknames like Clucky or CockBoi, and because it feels like an earned reward. To adopt animals and start making moolah off their milk and eggs you have to have enough hay to feed them, buy the darn critters themselves and construct a barn, which itself requires a certain financial stability and possession of the right resources (namely rock, timber and coins). The only reason I engage in mining is that it's the only combat in the game...that and the fact my girlfriend never wants to venture into the depths but still wants an upgraded watering can....
I don't exaggerate when I say I couldn't care less about the social mechanics. Sorry Stardew Valley fans, but I don't give a rat's ass which pixelated paramour you pick or which ships dominate your yuri-addled minds. I don't care much for the characters, which is no fault of their legitimately varied personalities and the fun little stories you can experience alongside them. It's just that the relationships feel very bereft of weight – they're very transactional. I feel like I am filling up a progress bar by feeding the hot, mustachio'd doctor strawberries, rather than engaging with a complicated, multi-varied person, with wants and feelings other than his love for strawberries. If the village doc doesn't actually like strawberries, I'm sure a Stardew Valley fan will let me know in the comments below.
Stardew overcomes you with its cutesy, pixelated aesthetic. It has a varied color palette, everything is well represented in the pixel art and it's injected with enough fantastical elements to assign it a certain charm, as well as separate itself from other more "realistic" farming or life sims.
It is here where I want to make a distinction between "coziness as an aesthetic" and "coziness as an experience". An aesthetic is a visage – it is contour and paint jobs. The cozy aesthetic is orange leaves in the Fall, wide-eyed cutesy hamsters and smiling critters. The "coziness experience" is the feeling of comfort, which can be received by the "cozy aesthetics", sure, but I argue that comfort is so subjective a feeling there's no way to define it other than by personal experience. To me, comfort is a warm mug of coffee and a spliff. A relaxing stroll through the park. Or, at times, taking out my rage on hordes of unnamed enemy goombas.
While Stardew does present a very cozy aesthetic, the surprising feeling I received was far from what I would call "cozy". I encountered a pervasive and overbearing anxiety.
A day-cycle in Stardew gives you 15 minutes to accomplish all your daily tasks. 15 minutes to water your crops, take care of your chickens, clean up debris, gift the doctor a strawberry, kill a couple of slimes in the mines, buy something at the general store, oh no wait the store is closed today, guess you're not planting today, but hey you also have this sidequest to complete and the mayor is still looking for his underpants. You better make it up from the mines soon before you collapse and have to explain to Doctor Boyfriend why you lost all of his strawberries in the caves below town.
The daily grind of Stardew is precipitated by time anxiety – a general worry that you won't have enough time to do what you need to do. That there simply isn't enough time to do everything. There's an almost obsessive pattern of behavior the game instills in me, from making sure the crops are perfectly aligned and symmetrical, to the collect-a-thon that is the Community Center. It was my nervous desire to complete tasks that motivated my farming journey. This is a worthwhile pursuit – it is in the fomenting of such feelings that Stardew Valley excels as a game.
The cozy aesthetic is all well and good, in my book, but I don't think we as humans, at least those of us who care about art (and within that subsection those of us who believe games are art) should exclusively surround ourselves with comfortable experiences. Part of loving art is the praxis of challenging yourself – to confront new, often differing worldviews from your own. To feel an emotion so strongly, your heart starts palpitating. Stardew accomplished this, not in the way it nestled me in relaxation, but in the fact it made me feel something, even if it was, by and large, a feeling one could describe as agitated nervousness.
I tend to enjoy games when they elicit some emotional or intellectual response from me. I love a good story, with excellent writing and esoteric lore, or accessible yet complex combat mechanics – that fine line of "easy to learn, difficult to master' gameplay. At times, a game can win me over with overflowing style over substance. Any of these facets can lead to pathos – I play games to feel something, be it negative or positive emotions.
This is why I don't classify the anxiety Stardew Valley makes me feel as a negative experience – the fact it made me feel nervous was a worthwhile experience to unpack. I enjoy Stardew Valley because it is greater than the sum of its parts. What worries me is that "cozy" developers took the term as an easy commercial buzzword, rather than focus on making games that would make you feel or think.
Comfort is coziness, coziness implies a certain familiarity. What is unfamiliar, unknown or uncertain cannot incite coziness. In the breadth of the gaming landscape, sellers push you into buying their new "cozy game", racketeers of the ultimate experience of comfort and familiarity – they are trying to sell you relaxation in its pixelated, digital form.
But I ask: what really is the emotional experience of watering endless fields of corn in comparison to grinding levels in an RPG? Why is hunting the slimes in the mines any more comforting to a gamer than mowing down demons in Doom? Despite its brutality, the world of Elden Ring offers many moments of respite under the vast swathe of purple skies. Can a soul not reach comfort by the site of grace?
I think it's easier to deliver on "coziness as an aesthetic" than it is to promise a "cozy experience". I haven't played Animal Crossing (chalk that up to a personal beef I have with Nintendo) but one of my friends stated that, while the cutesy animal villagers sure do deliver on the promise of the cozy aesthetic, she experienced an intrusive feeling of loneliness with New Horizons. At times, the neighborhood critters seem like ghosts that haunt a liminal space. A Little To The Left must be a nightmare for certain perfectionists. Unpacking is probably not a relaxing experience for everyone. Not everyone wants to build a town, simulate a relaxed life in the countryside, move framed pictures until they're straight, or help a family of four unpack their belongings.
Stardew Valley, other than its cutesy veneer, doesn't differentiate itself too much from the other games I play in the pathos it evokes.
I believe the rise of the term comes from the fact coziness is something that appeals to many in a hyper-capitalized, over-worked, underpaid society. I truly believe that unless you're "hardcore" about gaming, and have the funds available, it's a pretty intimidating and inaccessible hobby. You see the most spoken-of games being difficult, violent or shooter-y and that might not appeal to your sensibilities. But a game that promises you a relaxing time on the farm? It screams for your wallet. I would urge you to hold off on buying games off that fact alone.
The games that promise you coziness, comfort and familiarity still have to contend with the fact they're selling you a "game", which is an active engagement, it has win and lose conditions. Reclining in comfort is passive. Unwinding is all well and good – gaming is my main hobby, I would be lying if I said gaming didn't make me feel better after a long day. But I think I've avoided "cozy gaming" because I've found its promise in the oddest of spaces.
I see "cozy gaming" as more of a commodified branding and advertisement term than anything else. This is to state, I don't mind if you, as a gamer, seek comfort and relaxation in "cozy gaming". But I would watch out for people trying to sell you a game on this premise alone. I am always attempting to encourage gamers to play games outside of their comfort zones.
And that's the point I'm trying to make – games have to give us more than familiarity. We don't need hundreds of games pushing "cozy gaming" to the masses. We need games to evoke complex feelings, allow us to confront the world or say something interesting about it. If all a game can commit to is "coziness", I would sooner find that veneer in a tasty boomer shooter or a rough and tumble action game, than I would on cute anime girls and furry critters playing dress up.
THE DESSERT CART
Pao Yumol has done it again. Her latest piece for Bullet Points Monthly is about the Elden Ring DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree. It happens to be the best piece of games writing I've read all year.
Pao delves pretty deep into the story and lore of the DLC and its NPCs, so massive spoilers if you haven't finished the DLC yet. You will love this essay if you enjoy deep, lengthy, evocative, personal reflections on gaming, hentai, monster girls and loneliness.
Pao is a true wordsmith and a huge inspiration to me. She is one of the main reasons I "learned to stop caring" and started writing about games so late in my life. She deserves not just a read, but your continuous support. I have linked her piece below – please, pretty please, take a gander and read. You won't regret it.
Pao Yumol
