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I<\/span> am 85 hours into Death Stranding 2, an apocalyptic nightmare about Earth becoming infected with death monsters, and I\u2019ve realised that I\u2019m playing it as a cosy game. For hours at a time, I trundle along the photorealistic landscapes in my pick-up truck, delivering parcels to isolated communities and building new roads. The only reason I complete the main story missions is to open new areas of the map so that I can meet new people and build more roads. I find it blissfully enjoyable.<\/p>\n Of course, I am far from alone in playing video games this way. \u201cCosy games\u201d have become a thriving cottage industry over the past five years, led by crossover successes such as Minecraft, Stardew Valley and Untitled Goose Game, but also housing hundreds of smaller titles that appeal to highly engaged communities. On Steam this month you\u2019ll discover Catto\u2019s Post Office, a delightful game about a feline postal worker, Fruitbus, a cute food truck management sim, MakeRoom, an interior design challenge, and Tiny Bookshop, which is about running \u2026 a tiny bookshop. Most of these games are united by the same elements: small teams, often young, often working remotely; short play spans; low-stakes challenges; and highly stylised visuals, as an aesthetic choice and an economic necessity.<\/p>\n But why, if the audience for cosy games has been firmly established, aren\u2019t there more lavish mainstream, triple-A examples? It\u2019s clear producers such as Ubisoft, EA and Xbox are finding it tough to come up with fresh ideas \u2013 that\u2019s why they\u2019ve all spent (wasted) many millions trying to make the next identikit live service shooter to compete with Fortnite. So why not, I don\u2019t know, try to make a big open-world adventure based around positive interactions and soft drama? The TV, film and book industries are crammed with this sort of stuff. Where is my video game version of Call the Midwife? Why can\u2019t I ride a bicycle around 1950s east London delivering babies while faintly patronising decent working folk? Where is the video game equivalent of Downton Abbey or Gilmore Girls?<\/p>\n <\/span>Horribly charming \u2026 Untitled Goose Game.<\/span> Photograph: House House<\/p>\n Of course, I understand the most obvious answers. Like Hollywood, mainstream game development is largely based on minimising risk, and since the dominant cultural strand has always been action, violence and power fantasy, we inevitably end up where we are: with a thousand different combat adventures and not a single big-budget game about the love lives of a witty single mum and her sometimes exasperating daughter. But when we start to talk about culture rather than money, other factors come into play. \u201cI think cosy gamers are a nuanced audience that values stories and mechanics over visual fidelity,\u201d says Moo Yu, creative director at small studio Team Artichoke, which is making an adorable anti-capitalist puzzle game named Mythmatch. \u201cWhile I do think big-budget cosy games are absolutely going to be developed, it is an audience that isn\u2019t begging for one and is capable of appreciating a wider range of experiences at a wider range of price points.\u201d<\/p>\n This is an important detail \u2013 high-end visuals and vast open worlds aren\u2019t necessarily the prize goal, they\u2019re just one aesthetic and immersive option. Untitled Goose Game would perhaps not have been so amusing if the lovely village had been photorealistic and the horrible goose constructed from 100,000 texture-mapped polygons. Stardew Valley is beautiful because<\/em> it resembles a vividly colourful retro game, not despite it. Art is not just about slavish reproduction, thank goodness. Part of the cosiness of the cosy genre is the restriction of both choice and outcome; the game takes your hand and says come this way, you are safe.<\/p>\n <\/span>Community over authority \u2026 Mythmatch.<\/span> Photograph: Team Artichoke<\/p>\n My lifelong friend Jon Cartwright is a veteran game developer who mentors small studios in Australia and New Zealand. When I emailed him about all this he replied: \u201cWhen I think of a cosy game, I think of limited scope\/size. And that\u2019s been a function of them broadly being developed by smaller indie teams with limited budgets. But I think with the overload of \u2026 well, everything<\/em> going on in the world, and especially during the stress of Covid, having a small, safe environment with low stakes gameplay was a really untapped market. The fact that the visuals were \u2018simple\u2019 was another source of comfort and charm.\u201d<\/p>\n Charm is hard to replicate \u2013 it won\u2019t materialise because you\u2019ve developed an expensive new graphics engine, or because you have 500 staff working on it for 18 hours a day. You can\u2019t build hi-tech charm centres in the desert. It can<\/em> happen in big games, just like it can in big TV dramas, but it\u2019s a limited and unstable commodity. And in fact, the whole notion of the cosy game as an identifiable genre or deliberate play metric is still relatively young; games for so long, were mostly about winning. The verbs and adjectives of games about being nice to people have yet to be formalised. There\u2019s a hoary old cliche that games are the opposite of film because explosions are cheap but a closeup shot of a human face showing emotion is wildly expensive. You could say that, in an interactive medium with historically limited visual naturalism, it\u2019s been easier to create drama through having someone shoot at you than ask you on a date. But we have a hundred years of animation history to show us how charm, cosiness and emotional intimacy can be drawn from the most symbolic and stylised palettes.<\/p>\n Moo Yu is certain that mainstream, naturalistic cosy epics will happen \u2013 in fact, he cites the fashion-focused role-playing game Infinity Nikki as an example. Until then, I will be in Death Stranding 2, having to fake care about chiral contamination and extinction entities just so I can rescue kangaroos, visit inventors and drive my truck through irradiated landscapes of considerable beauty. Sometimes you have to play their game to win your own.<\/p>\n <\/span>Retro shooter \u2026 Operation Night Strikers.<\/span> Photograph: Taito\/M2<\/p>\n August is proving a spectacular month for retro arcade collections and I cannot resist recommending one more before I regretfully return to the 21st century. Operation Night Strikers<\/strong> is a collection of four acclaimed Taito shooters from the late-1980s including the seminal light gun blaster Operation Wolf, essentially an interactive combination of the action flicks Rambo and Commando. Also here are its decent sequel Operation Thunderbolt, plus two lesser-known greats \u2013 cyberpunk flying car shooter Night Striker and Space Gun, a frenetic take on Aliens, complete with face huggers and flame throwers. As usual for modern collections, save functions have been added, and if you get the Switch version, you can use your JoyCon as a makeshift light gun. It\u2019s not very accurate, but it\u2019ll remind veteran arcade dwellers of using Operation Wolf\u2019s original mounted Uzi gun controller.<\/p>\n These colourful, fast and ridiculous popcorn games perfectly capture the spirit of the era, with their smooth scrolling 2D backdrops, banging electro-pop soundtracks and monosyllabic, muscle-bound heroes. You\u2019ll be back.<\/p>\n Available on: <\/strong>PC, Switch <\/span>Gotta catch \u2019em all \u2026 Pikachu.<\/span> Photograph: The Pok\u00e9mon Company<\/p>\n In a story that will strike a chord with anyone who remembers the antics of Veruca Salt, McDonald\u2019s Japan<\/strong> has had to cancel a Pok\u00e9mon promotion due to massive food waste and rampant scalping. According to Eurogamer, an exclusive Pikachu card was made available as part of a limited-edition Happy Meal deal, but fans queued for hours, got into fights and discarded their unwanted food in the streets. Inevitably, scalpers were out in force attempting to horde the cards, which are now on auction sites at vastly inflated prices.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n It\u2019s always worth reading Rob Fahey\u2019s industry essays on GamesIndustry.biz. This week he looks at the unsuccessful success of PlayStation<\/strong>, analysing why and how the console is raking in revenue, despite plenty of mis-steps, including the seemingly obligatory pivot to live service, which has failed to yield any noticeable rewards.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Has it really been 20 years since Xbox<\/strong> achievements changed game design? To mark the occasion, AV Club has written an interesting analysis of their arrival, focusing on how gamers reacted to having their dopamine reserves so heavily commodified.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Sign up to Pushing Buttons<\/span><\/p>\n Keza MacDonald’s weekly look at the world of gaming<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n <\/span>Juggernaut on the horizon \u2026 GTA VI.<\/span> Photograph: Rockstar Games<\/p>\n This one came in from Rich John on BlueSky:<\/p>\n \u201cIs it healthy for the industry to have a juggernaut like GTA VI sucking up lots of the headlines and (expectedly) money? How does it impact other publishers?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Well, put it this way: no major games company is going to be putting up its big hope for 2026 in the same launch window as Rockstar\u2019s long-awaited behemoth. When the game was originally slated for a late 2025 launch, three triple-A developers told industry newsletter the Game Business they were giving it a wide berth. This can be hugely disruptive to development teams who may have spent years planning for a specific release slot \u2013 it can also create a media and marketing black hole, where for a few weeks, no one is interested in anything else.<\/p>\n However, it\u2019s not all bad. When GTA V<\/strong> arrived in 2013, it didn\u2019t destroy everything in its path \u2013 casual mobile games such as Puzzle & Dragons<\/strong> and Candy Crush<\/strong> did fine, as did titles with dedicated fanbases such as World of Warcraft<\/strong> and Call of Duty<\/strong>. Also, a massive hit like GTA brings wider attention, interest and potentially investment to the whole industry, and there is plenty of money to be made from releasing similar titles in the wake of the original \u2013 Grand Theft Auto spawned a whole genre of gangland adventures from Saint<\/strong>s Row<\/strong> to Sleeping Dogs<\/strong>, while also lending innovative new design features to the entire market (GTA Online was, after all, the original live service experiment).<\/p>\n So yes, it\u2019s healthy. Kind of. The immediate financial shock can be challenging for other studios, but GTA V showed that casual gamers and dedicated fans of other franchises didn\u2019t abandon everything and flock to Rockstar. Furthermore, the aftermath of a spectacular success can open new opportunities. After all, before Star Wars, no Hollywood studio would have touched a big budget sci-fi flick, but in the following years, we got Alien, Blade Runner, The Thing and the Star Trek movies. Success is inspiring \u2013 even when it happens to our rivals.<\/p>\n If you\u2019ve got a question for Question Block \u2013 or anything else to say about the newsletter \u2013 <\/em>email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I am 85 hours into Death Stranding 2, an apocalyptic nightmare about Earth becoming infected with death monsters, and I\u2019ve realised that I\u2019m playing it as a cosy game. For hours at a time, I trundle along the photorealistic landscapes in my pick-up truck, delivering parcels to isolated communities and building new roads. The only<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15661,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[8924,1285,634,3464,3238,378,9200,9201,8085],"class_list":{"0":"post-15660","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-audiences","9":"tag-big","10":"tag-call","11":"tag-cosy","12":"tag-epic","13":"tag-games","14":"tag-midwife","15":"tag-sim","16":"tag-wheres"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15660"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15660\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15661"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}What to play<\/h2>\n
Estimated playtime: <\/strong>10-plus hours<\/p>\nWhat to read<\/h2>\n
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Question Block<\/h2>\n