In one sense, someone could see the release of a game like Unpacking as opportunistic. It came out in the midst of the pandemic – not quite at the beginning but still early on enough where people were uncertain about how we would consider returning back to the status quo. It almost felt like society itself was “unpacking”: moving away from months of quarantine and distancing and slowly trying to make the world feel like “home” again, like it did before we all went into lockdown. As I’ve come to realize, though, people’s views on the game varied a lot more widely than I had initially expected.
In class, we had an interesting discussion about how the gameplay in Unpacking was sometimes more upsetting than it was worth. I could definitely see where this argument is coming from, but it was an even more interesting thought when it comes to the idea of game development and proliferation. Cozy games are able to thrive as a genre because of the fact that people, as a result of some other circumstance, continuously seek coziness.
In other words – to feel cozy, you first have to feel uncozy. There is no light without darkness; there is no comfort without discomfort. In a way, the entire genre of cozy games is opportunistic. They combat the inevitable “tedium” – the uniformity, the sameness – of our uncomfortable, anxiety-inducing lives with a different kind of tedium that comes in the form of more calm and comforting activities like planting crops on a farm, playing fishing minigames, and… unpacking stacks and stacks of boxes.
How is it that a game like Unpacking is so successful, despite being so frustrating? I mean, the game won “Game of the Year” and a series of other awards at the Australian Game Developer Awards – but it also spawned less than favorable reactions like those from members of our class. One of the biggest sources of complaint was not simply the fact that the gameplay was repetitive, but also that it was very strict in its repetitiveness. Certain tasks could only be completed in certain ways, and this pattern of trial and error can become pretty exhausting after a while.
So, if cozy games are supposed to function as an escape from a kind of monotony, then how do they succeed by throwing us into another?
My take on this is that it’s… pretty subjective. Some people find comfort in spending hours trying to figure out where to place a random person’s stuffed animal in a room – other people do not. That’s fair. However, I think it’s worth considering how, in the same way the troubles in life are different, we find comfort from those troubles in different ways. Even as a collective of people who play video games, that distinction can follow us down to the genre or even the specific IP. For some of us, there is comfort in the “uncomfortable”: we escape from real-life stress by creating and managing artificial stress, like the kind found in the hellish arrangement of socks and toiletries in a space that we can barely call our own.
On another note, I guess it’s also interesting that my first instinct was to label Unpacking as a “cozy game”. As I saw from another post on this blog, that may not be a universal thought. In that sense, the way that we categorize video games could also have a direct impact on how we perceive them. Maybe Unpacking wouldn’t defy our expectations so much if it were labeled as a puzzle game rather than as a cozy game, or if it was labeled as a mixture of the two.
I don’t know, though. As someone who joyously spends hours collecting fruit to pay off my house debt and planting virtual acres-worth of crops to maintain my late grandfather’s farm, I regularly find comfort in seemingly tedious things. What someone else gets out of cozy games like this is another discussion altogether – that’s their own journey to unpack.
As an aspiring game designer, I sometimes have mini panic attacks when people mention that that one mechanic in that one game I enjoyed so much is frustrating and adds little to the experience. Grinding MMORPGs, mining in space engineering, preparing your ship in Stardeus, crafting the zenith in Teraira, etc. There seems to be a fine balance between rewarding familiar mechanical repetition and boring virtual busy work. I think the so-called “cozy or chill game genera is meant to be the real-life equivalent of dozing off and daydreaming, by introducing players to simple repetitive mechanics that are easy to commit to the unconscious and muscle memory, the game is able to remedy some mental fatigue. The so-called “turn your brain off” type of entertainment.
Our collective sense of tedium and frustration with Unpacking might be partially caused by it being a subject of critical analysis of a uni class, we learned multiple methods of video game critical analysis and carried with us the unconscious expectation of the gaming experience, and with a monotonous gameplay loop, this can easily cause the feelings stated above.
tdlr: This class ruins video games >:(
I really like the ways in which you examined how coziness requires a lack of coziness. It makes me think a lot about why exactly cozy games are so cozy. For me, I think that beyond just offering a different kind of tedium from that which exists in my life, these kinds of games, importantly, offer an END to the tedium – it is tedium that gets completed, as opposed to the seemingly endless tedium of my real life. In my real life, as soon as I complete a task, there is always a new task start working on, or soon that task will become uncompleted and I will have to complete it again. But in Unpacking, I am presented with a series of problems, I solve them, and then I’m done. I won. It has a similar satisfaction in that way to my experience of roguelikes (I will never stop talking about roguelikes). Life feels like a Sisyphean tasks in a lot of ways – no matter how far I roll the boulder up the hill, it always comes crashing back down and I have to pick it back up and carry on again. But in roguelikes, though they share a similar Sisyphean vibe, allow me to complete that endless task, rolling the ball up the hill over and over and finally, eventually, when I’ve earned it, make it. Certainly the satisfaction is due to the struggle (perhaps tedium) of the journey, but it is only satisfying because I actually complete something at the end – both of these ingredients are essential to the satisfaction.
This got a little sadder than I meant it to, but I find comparing in-game problem and challenge structures to those in real life fascinating and enlightening, and I like to think about why my (surface level) unenjoyment of parts of a game can make me enjoy them as a whole even more.
This is really interesting. I love how you pointed out that discomfort is a requirement for comfort. I, like many people, turned to cozy games during the pandemic. My favorite one was Potion Craft, in which you live as an alchemist who makes and sells potions for a living. For me, what made the game cozy was the predictability – I knew what to expect and every day was pretty much the same. I guess it was a way for me to escape from the complexities and confusions of real life.
The topic of escapism in video games is also really interesting: most video games take place in some sort of setting unfamiliar to the average video game consumer (wars, outer space, fantasy worlds, etc.). Perhaps one reason people play video games is to experience something new; an experience they can never have in real life. This would potentially help explain why cozy games became so popular during the pandemic as people were actively seeking ways to entertain themselves and cozy games presented an opportunity not only for entertainment, but also escape.