Crafting Comfort: Postdigital Practices in Current Cozy Games

This paper examines how a subset of cozy video games, a genre defined more by aesthetic feel than by conventional game mechanics, incorporates nondigital media technologies and practices into its design. The authors propose conceptualizing these choices as "postdigital practices," distinguishing them from the glitch and failure aesthetics that have dominated earlier discussions of postdigitality. Their central argument is that foregrounding analog tools such as tape recorders, instant cameras, and scrapbooks within digital spaces can evoke nostalgia and reinforce the genre's sense of safety, abundance, and softness. The paper positions this perspective as complementary to existing research on cozy games, which has addressed feminist design, the politics of care, neoliberal critique, and mental health benefits.

The authors ground their framework in concepts from remediation theory, transmediality, and game studies, and they illustrate it through a detailed case study of Season: A Letter to the Future (2023), a painterly narrative exploration game. In Season, the player-character records sounds, photographs scenes, and transcribes dialogue, then assembles these materials into a digital scrapbook designed to resemble a physical book. The game's mechanics are deliberately simple, its writing lyrical and contemplative, and its visual style inspired by British and Japanese artistic traditions. The authors characterize the resulting experience as a postdigital form of guided meditation that encourages players to slow down and attend to sensory detail.

The paper's scope is primarily conceptual and interpretive, focusing on a small number of games rather than presenting a systematic empirical survey. Its contribution lies in offering an analytical lens that can be applied across a broad range of cozy titles, while acknowledging the difficulty of defining the genre itself.