Ivy Road
Company
2 documents in the library are about Ivy Road, from writers such as DiGRA and Game File. Each has a summary and key insights with the page they come from.
Connections
Each row is a game or company named alongside Ivy Road, each column a document, oldest first. A mark means that document names it. Select a row to see those documents.
Documents about Ivy Road
Whitepaper3 pages
My Cozy Hero: How Cozy Games Challenge Conventional Hero Dynamics
This paper examines how cozy video games reshape the traditional hero paradigm that dominates mainstream digital play.
- Cozy games shift the hero paradigm away from combat, conquest, and power accumulation toward care, gentleness, and relational support, positioning coziness as both an aesthetic and an ethical stance.
- The study draws on Project Horseshoe's definition of coziness as "the fantasy of safety, abundance, and softness" and on Miguel Sicart's concept of "player logic" as its theoretical foundation.
- The analysis is based on close readings of three titles (Spiritfarer, Wanderstop, and Sips and Sonnets) rather than large-scale player surveys or quantitative data, and is presented as among the first systematic studies of the hero's role in the genre.
DiGRAJun 2026
Article
Back Next Week
Stephen Totilo's March 31, 2026 Game File newsletter announces a brief spring-break hiatus, with regular editions resuming the week of April 6, while rounding up game impressions, industry headlines, upcoming releases, and a podcast appearance.
- The video game industry is experiencing severe instability as of late March 2026, marked by significant layoffs at Eidos Montreal and Polyarc, and the closure of Ivy Road.
- Industry veterans characterize the current economic climate as more severe than the market crash of the 1980s, with few professionals remaining unaffected.
- Nexon is shifting to a conservative investment strategy that prioritizes fewer, high-conviction projects with proven long-term retention and margin potential.
Game FileMar 2026