Ivy Road

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.