Cozy video games can quell stress and anxiety

The Reuters article might be conflating some game design philosophies (relaxed, unrushed, non-competitive, no penalty for failure) with some game themes (farming, building, social relationships).

Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley - yeah for sure these are some of the original and most iconic "cozy games" out there.

But personally my favorite game in that genre is Graveyard Keeper, mechanics feel reminiscent of Stardew Valley, but when you're not burying bodies you're out looking for booze to keep a talking skull inebriated.

And frankly the coziest game experience I have these days is with a title that no one ever would have associated with that term a few years ago: World of Warcraft. Nostalgia probably has something to do with it but they've now added a solo player mode (Delves) which is relaxed, unrushed, non-competitive etc. You can die five or six times before you fail, and penalties are light, but frankly, they're not very hard. If you have a spare half hour you can just Delves'n'chill by yourself and come out with a gear upgrade or two.

So, I think it is not the theme, not even the mechanics but a set of game design principles that makes a game cozy. What were not cozy were the competitive FPSes and fighting games I played when I was younger, where we were all screaming at each other - that stuff can be fun but these days my emotional energy is directed elsewhere and I game to recharge.

I thought it was an interesting perspective from someone who has lived a very un-American life.

He must find Beethoven scandalous.

Yeah Lofi is huge!

Yeah… but if you had to rip heads off of demons in your day job you might not feel that way.

Mick Gordon music makes me ride my bike faster. In the same vein: https://davdralleon.bandcamp.com/album/street-krvzader

To my pride, my oldest child picked BYOB or Killing in the Name as his choices for his walk up song in little League baseball.

I've never, ever been prouder of him.

"Frasier", Season 5 Episode 12:

  Niles: [walks in] Hello, Dad.  I believe we switched videotapes on 
         accident.
 Martin: Believe me, I noticed.
  Niles: Yes, there you go. [hands over video] At first I was dismayed.  
         I popped in the tape, and there was Charles Bronson blowing 
         away street trash, but I actually got into it.  It was quite 
         suspenseful.
 Martin: Yeah, well, that's the way Duke and I felt about "My Dinner 
         With Andre."  Talk about suspense! [fake, dramatic 
         anticipation] Will they order dessert?  Will they leave a good 
         tip? [walks to chair and sits]

I have two therapist friends who like to watch horror movies because they say it’s a good outlet to externalize their stress and anxiety

I've come to resent the frenetic pace demanded of everything now. Why does everything must keep accelerating? Slow down and fix things I say.

This is good advice. One thing to note is that deep breathing needs to be slow. If you over oxygenate you may get weird sensations which can cause more anxiety. The standard advice seems to be 'square breathing': In for count of four, hold count of four, out for count of four, hold again for four.

Sensory overload sounds specific to some neuro divergent conditions, might not help with other people.

This excerpt has resonated deeply:

But, parallel to this political phenomenon, we observe the disappearance of free time. Free space and free time are now just memories. The free time in question is not leisure as commonly understood. Apparent leisure still exists, and even this apparent leisure defends itself and becomes more widespread through legal measures and mechanical improvements against the conquest of hours by activity.

Workdays are measured and their hours counted by law. But I say that inner leisure, which is something entirely different from chronometric leisure, is being lost. We are losing that essential peace in the depths of our being, that priceless absence, during which the most delicate elements of life refresh and comfort themselves, during which being, in a way, cleanses itself of past and future, of present consciousness, of suspended obligations and ambushed expectations. No worry, no tomorrow, no internal pressure; but a kind of rest in absence, a beneficial vacancy, which returns the mind to its own freedom. It then concerns itself only with itself. It is freed from its duties toward practical knowledge and unburdened from the care of immediate things: it can produce pure formations like crystals. But now the rigor, tension, and rush of our modern existence disturb or squander this precious rest. Look within yourself and around you! The progress of insomnia is remarkable and follows exactly all other forms of progress.

How many people in the world now sleep only with synthetic sleep, and provide themselves with nothingness from the learned industry of organic chemistry! Perhaps new arrangements of more or less barbituric molecules will give us the meditation that existence increasingly forbids us from obtaining naturally. Pharmacology will someday offer us depth. But, in the meantime, fatigue and mental confusion are sometimes such that one naively finds oneself longing for Tahitis, paradises of simplicity and laziness, lives of slow and inexact form that we have never known. Primitives are unaware of the necessity of finely divided time.

There were no minutes or seconds for the ancients. Artists like Stevenson, like Gauguin, fled Europe and went to islands without clocks. Neither mail nor telephone harassed Plato. The train schedule did not rush Virgil. Descartes could lose himself in thought on the quays of Amsterdam. But our movements today are regulated by exact fractions of time. Even the twentieth of a second is beginning to be no longer negligible in certain domains of practice.

No doubt, the organism is admirable in its flexibility. It has so far resisted increasingly inhuman treatments, but, ultimately, will it always sustain this constraint.

- Le bilan de l'intelligence, Paul Valéry, 1935

Nah not at all, spending time alone is crucially important to me for managing anxiety. Solo dinner is great. Being surrounded by people constantly is a way for my anxiety to greatly increase.

Little Kitty Big City is a gem.

Thanks for that list. I had no idea.

Although, sadly, most of those game appear to not have done very well :(

Sometimes it's less about the genre and more about how the game makes you feel

I've played slither quite a bit, and I find it very stressful, it's hard to survive and very frustrating when you die, but I do think it's a brilliant little game.

I found out about slither.io here at hn. Also found out about the similar one agar.io.

That was great, thanks!

And without management breathing down your neck.

I don't think I ever made it into flow state once in Elden Ring even though I beat it. I just grinded until I was high level enough that it didn't matter that I didn't time any of the bosses right.

My go to is Cyberpunk 2077, something about wandering aimlessly around the dystopic city let's me disconnect, I don't even do the missions or combat.

Same thing can be said about any religion.

There is a reason there are elaborate stories, rituals, prayers, pilgrimages etc etc in all religions. Its not an accident. All these practices, with the prime feature being Repetition, allows for a mental shift to happen/different parts of the brain are kept repeatedly activated, compared to the ones constantly responding to source of depression/stress/anxiety. This opens the door for a focus shift.

The key point is, it might have an effect on people positively, but doesn't change the environment (and the triggers) people return too.

Therefore at best these are coping mechanisms, until we have holistic approaches, where the people and the environment they are in or return too are both being looked at. Not just one or the other and hoping for the best.

Opposite the "cozy" part of the game. OP's game is infamously challenging.

Same in terms of quelling anxiety, but I think the commenter was referencing the fact that, in contrast to the original post mentioning 'cozy' games, this commenter is talking about a highly 'un-cozy' game.

You think of Elden Ring as cozy?

That's always how I've played games. Once I see the ending the game is "done" and I can't get myself to play it anymore, so I always do the final boss last

This is the exact reason why I haven't killed Ganon yet, in spite of putting 400+ hours into the game. Now I look forward to starting all over again - this time in 4K and with hopefully better performance, once I get my Switch 2.

100%. The blood moon's appearance and the scary piano music when you encounter a guardian, always gives me anxiety. I wish I could skip the blood moon's cutscene reliably.

> But they’re not the first games that came to my mind when I see “cozy video games that can quell stress and anxiety”.

I think what quells stress is the lighting, a game which is mostly outdoor sunny is relaxing in my experience compared to mostly dark games. I had that experience with rocket league of all games

Haven't played BotW though, so this was my impression from gameplay videos

That's why I am playing TotK without durability, it was such an annoyance that ruined everything else for me. Might make some things easier but I am not there for the challenge.

I rage quit the game several times before it finally clicked.

The realisation was that "wait, Link is a coward!". I then avoided most battle encounters and spent most of my time just exploring.

The game doesn't hold your hand, but it does guide you to discover things pretty well. I never really felt lost, which is something I've often had problem with when playing open world games. I could explore, but I could also easily get back to whatever I needed to continue progress. There was also no penalty for exploration once you can fast travel, as you can easily get out of a bad situation.

What I think is really good is that there is no one right way to do something. With some games if you can't figure out what they are trying to tell you, you hit a brick wall. With BotW, I could always figure something out, even if it wasn't "right". For example, at one point you can talk to the old man chopping down trees and the intent is for you to chop down a tree to make a bridge across a gap. For whatever reason, I didn't pick up on this. However, there was a wall that I thought I might be able to use to climb over there. It wasn't trivial (I died several times), but it taught me how to find little places on walls to recover stamina while climbing. I was still able to get over there. This lesson on climbing paid dividends throughout my entire play through, while the tree bridge mechanic was almost never needed again.

The first non-red Bokoblin (in the skull with the archer out front) probably killed me 10 times on the first play through. That was a bit frustrating, but I eventually got it. But I just ran in there and tried to fight him directly. To use tactics, you should have just gotten a bow and arrow before activating the first tower, and you can shoot the rope that suspends the hanging light inside the skull (by shooing through the hole where the skull's eye would be). This causes an explosion and gives you a big leg up in the fight. Later there are shines that help teach you how to use the various fighting mechanics, which help level up your skill controlling Link.

Most of the dying I didn't mind so much, because there was little to no penalty for it, and all felt like I was learning something. Can I jump off this high thing... nope dead... how else can I do this? I used the manual save a lot, instead of just relying on the autosave, if I was about to do something risky.

Once you’ve grabbed your initial set of abilities from the opening area and stocked up on some weapons it becomes much easier. Shifting your mindset to “combat is almost entirely optional” also changes how hard the game feels.

Newbies tend to be really afraid of the monsters early in the game. Maybe you are used to games that puts enemies there for players to kill. You’re supposed to sneak around enemies in the early game (you just woke up weak after a 100 years…)

With that being said I don’t think it is newbie friendly though. The controls uses all buttons and many with different modes. It’s can be quite overwhelming imho.

I think the lack of guardrails are what helped me relax with it. Because there was no “right” way, I didn’t have to worry about doing anything wrong. It also allowed for doing multiple play throughs with various self imposed rules. For example, I am the type to always save my good weapons and never use them, so I did a play through where I always used my strongest weapons first. I did another where I tried to see how hard I could get not fighting anything and being a pacifist. Another with no armor or no health/stamina upgrades. All of these required different tactics which kept it interesting.

I might have to try this again. I got it on the GameCube when it came out, but remember hitting a wall and being frustrated. The open world change really old me on Zelda. I might give some of the older games another look after finally falling in love with the modern Zelda games.

For me it's also mostly the exploring angle. Do you know any more BOTW style exploration games ?

I touched on this in my own reply to the grandparent comment [0]. I realized a while ago that lots of competitive games I played regularly were making me feel animosity towards the people I was playing them with, and it led me to think about this issue for quite a while.

Competition is such a default in game design that a game not based on it often isn’t recognized as a game at all. There are cooperative games, but aside from Minecraft, none of them are particularly popular. It’s arguable that this a reflection of the human condition; living things are always fighting for resources, so games attempt to emulate this competition.

It’s odd that this ended up being the paradigm, though; digital worlds can provide us with a space to explore what we would conventionally consider to be impossible - infinite worlds which obviate the need for competition in the first place. There’s maybe a commentary on human nature to be made that even in a game like Minecraft, so many players’ first inclination is to start fighting each other.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43736674

It's interesting to me, the shift I've had to co-op games over the years (both board and video games). With one group of friends, we play exclusively cooperative games, whereas another only wants to ever play competitive games. For me, co-op is just so much more relaxing. It's also far more social, whereas playing competitive games the socializing usually happens outside of the game itself. You can definitely be over-competitive in cooperative games too though.

Agree, Undertale is absolutely brilliant in that aspect. Especially the beginning (the part that is in the demo version). The mood changes after that, for the worse I thought. Things got a bit more silly/naive than I like. The ending is absolutely brilliant again, tough, in the same way (it is a reflection on game mechanics). It is not 4h because you'll want to retry some parts.

Yes, I sim race, but don't enjoy other sport games. But that's pretty limited scope, when it comes to creative worlds and storytelling isn't it? I am interested in what a game in a world like Bioshock would be like if the game could have no combat.

That's just combat but with stronger rules

Well to first describe the specific types of copouts, so many amazing story missions eventually boil down to "kill everyone who is the way of pulling the switch that achieves our goal". Or "here is a complex social build up describing conflicting morales, with multiple possible solutions socially/mechanically... kill the person you disagree with."

What if instead the majority of the gameplay was unique game mechanics that actually achieve the goal. Instead of "oh no it's full of monsters who are in the way of the buttons", why not having to scavenge the parts, solve some mechanical and electrical puzzles. Maybe find a person and get the right dialogue options to get information you need out of them, that actually applies to the puzzles, etc... this is all in existing games already of course, but hopefully that illustrates what I am getting at.

Cyberpunk 2077 had this issue in spades, as all the storylines were so interesting, and could have had such interesting game mechanics tied to them. But it was mostly combat.

I am not saying that makes it a bad game, just that there is so much room for other mechanics.

that caught me too, and now I can't stop trying to imagine what it might be.

I may have to revisit it. It was pretty zen unless it rains but I got a bit bored of the Norman reedus walking simulator after a while.