To Farm or Take Back the Farm? Cosy Gaming vs. Resistance Gaming | Natallia Valadzko

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Natallia Valadzko

To Farm or Take Back the Farm? Cosy Gaming vs. Resistance Gaming

During COVID-19 lockdowns, many people took up different hobbies: making sourdough bread, learning to play a musical instrument, or… Animal Crossing: New Horizons (ACNH). The delayed release of the game in March 2020 coincided with the global pandemic, which turned a social simulation game into an entire “phenomenon”, according to The New York Times. It sold over 43 million copies worldwide, broke the console game record for most digital units sold in a single month, and became the 14th best-selling video game in history. Meanwhile, I was watching every sports anime I could get my hands on. I didn’t own a Nintendo Switch, so I didn’t really get to experience Animal Crossing first-hand. Spending too much time online, however, kept me in the loop about the game’s extraordinary popularity. It was said to offer a safe and wholesome escape from the frightening reality of worldwide pandemic outbreak. It was also sometimes used as a substitute for social interactions, for example, weddings, graduations, and even political campaigning (shoutout to Joe Biden and his in-game yard signs).

In essence, an ACNH player controls a character who moves to a deserted island and develops it to their liking. You can farm, go fishing, gather and craft items, decorate and customise your island, and meet your neighbours, who are anthropomorphic animals. The visuals are relaxing, and the gameplay is stress-free. One of the reasons for its outstanding success was that it was very easy to pick up, no matter your age or background. You didn’t need any prior experience with controllers or video games at large.

These days, ACNH is almost guaranteed a spot in endless lists of “Top Cosy Games” – the kind of games where ‘cosy’ is used not just as an additional description but a definition. Unlike other genres (e.g., tactical RPGs, firstperson shooters, puzzle games), cosy games do not hint at the type of game mechanics employed, just an emotion. Both developers and gamers agree that cosy games are primarily defined by how they make one feel, and it doesn’t matter if it is a platformer, an RPG, or a puzzle game. Nonetheless, this slightly peculiar categorization makes sense. A person might not know which exact type of game they want to play; they just know how they want to feel.

Daniel Cook, the author of Cozy Games Manifesto, talks about cosiness in games in terms of three components: safety, abundance, and softness. Safety is described as the absence of danger, punishment, or exclusion. The player is free to play at their own pace and express themselves. Abundance has to do with the fulfilment of our basic needs, for instance, a character is not hungry and has housing and necessary resources. Then, a player can focus on the higher needs, like self-actualisation, appreciation of beauty, and interpersonal relationships. There is no lack or struggle. Finally, softness lies in ‘soft’ stimuli and the game’s manageable (spatial or emotional) scope. The aesthetics are not overstimulating and they signal being in a low-stress environment.

Daria Chmielewska

A cosy game protagonist is usually an ‘everyman’ and not the Chosen One, superhero, or a top-secret assassin. Combat and killing have long been an established progress mechanic in video games. Fighting and conquering – understood very broadly – is what often keeps people engaged. But if we take away the violence, there is a real challenge to find other ways to maintain the players’ engagement. How do we preserve the feeling of achievement without the high-stakes risk? How do we extend ‘cosiness’ beyond lo-fi soundtrack and farming? These are some of the questions that a lot of large game studios and indie creators are addressing right now, as more and more cosy games are being released every year.

Discussions and content creation around cosy games became especially widespread throughout the early 2020s. But of course, this doesn’t mean that ACNH started the cosy games trend. One of the earliest known posts about cosy games is a message on Reddit on 3rd September 2016, seeking recommendations for such games. And while we can say that the term was coined and popularised in late 2010s and early 2020s, unsurprisingly, the nature of cosy gaming is not new at all. Think of a life simulation game The Sims with its first release in 2000. Several elements present in The Sims are considered features of cosy gaming: endless character customization, the ability to spend hours building and decorating houses, etc. However, the game is not always that wholesome… A player can delete doors, which traps their Sim, or remove pool ladders with the Sim still in the water, all of which may result in dying. Or the fact that while you’re enjoying your sense of accomplishment from mastering the skill of knitting, your Sim could unexpectedly die by being squished by a pulldown bed, or literally die from embarrassment or laughter.

Cosy games are not just decorating and chatting with townsfolk. Sometimes a cosy game is just unpacking boxes of someone you’ve never met. Unpacking by Witch Beam is a part home decoration, part block-fitting game, which lets you explore someone’s life. With the mundanity of emptying boxes of your possessions and finding them a new place, the game creates an exceptional feeling of intimacy and vulnerability. Or let’s take Kind Words by an American indie developer Popcannibal. At the beginning of the game, the player helps a mail carrier deer, named Ella, who is nervous about her new job, by writing her an inspiring letter. After that, the player can anonymously send or ask for letters, while lo-fi music plays in the background.You can share your sorrows by requesting letters, receive words of comfort and sympathy from real people, and include a wide collection of stickers. No timers, no combat, no leaderboards. Only cosy soundtrack and reassuring messages.

As I mentioned before, a lot of cosy games include the mechanics of farming, whose monotonous repetitiveness can bring a feeling of calmness, and eventual harvesting – and with that, a sense of achievement. But what do you call a game where you’re stealing equipment in an attempt to take back the farm?

Here’s another kind of gaming: something I will label ‘resistance gaming’ for the purposes of this text. By no means is it a genre. But just like cosy games are defined by a vibe, resistance gaming can be defined by all the anti-topics it explores: anti-capitalism, anti-colonialism, anti-patriarchy, etc. In contrast to cosy gaming, which is often escapist in nature, this kind of gaming zooms into one of the social issues and does not allow you to look away. You’re thrown right in the midst of it and are given a chance to make a change. No safety, abundance, or softness. Instead, risk, lack, and injustice. All of which you can fight against, though.

To illustrate, consider the tabletop roleplaying game (TRPG) Our Farm Becomes the Battlefield by Fen Walters which deals with the themes of cooperation and anti-capitalism. The game’s description encourages you to play it if you “are sick of wealth inequity and wish that you could somehow punch those problems away” and if you want to play subversively and help those who need it. The game’s tagline reads: “What do you do when one man owns everything? You steal it, and you break his stuff”. At first glance, it sounds aggressive, violent and, honestly, criminal. But with more context, we learn that in this TRPG, you play as displaced farmers piloting magical golems – farm equipment which you’ve retrofitted for battle. You want to take back your land from the wizard Tysanto, who gained a monopoly on food production and forced you into sharecropping. Your characters are tasked with teaching themselves magic and forming a collective. All of that will help them fight the wizard but also the system that allowed this to happen in the first place. The game also highlights that there is no killing or death. It means that player characters don’t have individual health, so they cannot die. Instead, they function as a collective and level up or improve when the cooperative improves.

Daria Chmielewska

Another example is a TRPG that deals with colonialism and its consequences. Dog Eat Dog was written by Liam Liwanag as an attempt to understand his personal process of assimilation as a half-Filipino. The final 10-odd pages of the game’s handbook is A Brief History of Colonialism in the Pacific. It outlines several key points of imperialism and assimilation in the Pacific Islands, providing a bit more context. The game asks the participants to work together and describe a conflicted relationship between the colonisers trying to maintain control and the natives who either assimilate or rise up. One player takes the role of the Occupation, which means being in charge of the military, the government, and also businessmen or tourists. The rest of the players roleplay as individual Natives, each choosing the ways in which they deal with the new regime. On each player’s turn, they describe what they might do in response to either the Occupation’s actions or to anything in the preceding scene. The author also points out that the game can be played in any setting and time possible. According to the author, the game was built on the assumption that “[c]olonization implies contempt for the colonized”. It does not matter if they’re aliens with green skin, the Teutonic Order, or the Peace Corps: they wouldn’t be there if they did not believe they were better than the colonised.

Finally, I’d like to mention Invincible Sword Princess – a TRPG designed by Kazumi Chin. It is a game about postcolonial revenge. The setting invites characters to tell a story about their people who lived in the Hallows for a very long time, and about the Imperials who came with riots, armies, and mobs. The Hallows is described as a vast steppe with many lakes and a few settlements, the inhabitants of which live off fishing, herding sheep and cattle, and cultivating fruits and nuts. The Imperial presence is the violence of colonial occupation but also the terrors of what might happen, or of what they might say. At times one can just tell them what they want to hear, and they’ll ignore you; at times you are not as lucky. Players of Invincible Sword Princess assume the role of sword-wielding sisters who travel across the Hallows seeking the killers of their mother, who was not so lucky.

The player’s character defines superpowers of their sword, the relationship with their sisters, and assigns points to the three game stats: invincible, sword, and princess. They are used to avoid danger, unleash fury, and gain insight respectively. By rolling the number of dice determined by your stats, players and the game moderator decide the outcome of different encounters in a local saloon, in a small log cabin on the prairie, or before an adoring congregation. So, the hunt for the killer is not just combat. It is also about seeking information about the perpetrator, as well as keeping a low profile to avoid becoming a target for the Imperials.

Under the “Some Safety Considerations” section, the game’s rulebook encourages players to take their time to understand the principles that matter to the people of the Hallows: sovereignty and adaptability. The sword represents the long-standing tradition of the people of the Hallows and is contrasted with the new gunslinging technology brought by the colonial forces. Moreover, it is underlined that despite maintaining some traditional ways, the people of the Hallows are not stuck in the past. In fact, they alone have mastered the technologies necessary to create adaptive swords with which the vengeful sisters fight. Their weapons are customisable (e.g., adding invisibility, hydraulics, smoke-emitting, boomerang, etc.) but also keep “the heart of what a sword is”. Even though the game touches upon typical tropes and locations of the Western, it claims to be a refutation of the genre as it puts sisterhood and resistance to settler colonialism to the forefront.

Despite their differences, both types of gaming can be very therapeutic. Cosy games achieve this by removing the danger and allowing the space to just blissfully exist. Resistance gaming, on the other hand, makes you feel better by bringing about a much-needed change, or – oh well – lets you heal by taking revenge on those who’ve wronged you. With more and more global crises occurring and looming over us, we might need different ways of coping with them or imagining the necessary steps to handle them. As for now, let us watch studios create games that lift people up, in whatever form they need.