At a wide desk in a bedroom somewhere sits a figure, her back facing the camera, supported by an ergonomic white office chair. Her head is bracketed by puffy, white noise-cancelling headphones. Her wrists rest on a foam cloud as she plays a pixelated farm-simulation video game called Stardew Valley on a handheld Nintendo Switch. She is surrounded by screens. An expansive computer monitor in front of her displays footage of another game. A monitor to the side projects an animation of some friendly forest landscape, with animals flitting among gently swaying trees. On the wall, lights the shape of geometric tiles cast a soft glow in changing colors according to whatever is onscreen. On floating shelves above her rest small potted plants, signs of organic life amid a tranquil technological ecosystem. Her keyboard has keys in pastel colors that clack like a typewriter’s; next to it rests a glass mug of grass-green matcha latte. You can find proliferating versions of this figure across TikTok and Instagram, under the hashtag #cozygaming. She is completely ensconced in a serene environment, a self-contained digital and physical cocoon. Her accessories, the room’s soothing décor, and even her soft clothes and fuzzy blankets complement and extend the world of her games. As one cozy-gaming content creator put it, “Like someone having a bubble bath and candles and a glass of wine, you’re turning a typical normal activity into something more relaxing.”
Cozy gaming has become not just a social-media genre but a life style. The trend can be traced back to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nintendo released the latest iteration of its Animal Crossing series, in March of 2020, just in time for quarantined players to hide away as they built cutesy, cartoonish islands populated by anthropomorphized creatures and shared them with one another. The game, which has sold nearly fifty million copies to date, became emblematic of pandemic escapism, offering a kind of parallel virtual society in which interaction was still possible. Around the same time, a law student named Kennedy started posting videos of herself playing Animal Crossing and other, similarly soothing games, under the name @cozy.games, eventually accumulating six hundred thousand followers on TikTok and countless imitators.