Curled Up With a Good Game: A Survey Study on Personality Traits and Game Motives of Cozy Game Players

This 2025 survey study of 277 cozy game players investigates why people are drawn to cozy games, defined by comfort, safety, abundance, softness, and the absence of violence, and how their play motives relate to Light and Dark Triad personality traits. Motivated by cozy games' rising popularity during COVID-19 and a gap in research on player motivation, the authors draw on self-determination theory, social cognitive theory, uses-and-gratifications theory, and the Digital Games Motivation Scale. A central aim is to examine eudaimonic, meaning-seeking motives alongside hedonic ones, with the premise that cozy games' resource abundance, slow pacing, and social elements may make such motives especially salient.

The study's most prominent findings concern motive rankings and personality profiles. Moral self-reflection (M = 6.05) and agency (M = 5.80) emerged as the strongest motives, while the social motive was the only one falling below the scale midpoint (M = 3.49), a result the authors partly attribute to a measurement limitation, since the scale addressed socializing with human players but not with NPCs or player-avatar relationships. Players scored significantly higher on Light Triad traits than on Dark Triad traits, with Humanism (M = 5.87) emerging as a consistent predictor of eudaimonic and social motives, supporting the view that cozy games' prosocial and empathic themes attract prosocial players. Dark Triad associations with motives were mixed, and an apparent link between Machiavellianism and self-realization was judged likely spurious given low Machiavellianism scores in the sample.

The study's scope is limited in several respects. Recruitment occurred through online gaming communities, and the sample overrepresented female respondents and was dominated by fans of Stardew Valley, which accounted for 45% of favorite-game nominations, followed by the Animal Crossing series at 12.8%. The cross-sectional design, reliance on self-report measures, and these sampling features mean the findings describe associations rather than causal mechanisms, and the authors caution accordingly.