This is seventh of ten essays contained within the second issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, an experimental collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. I will be re-publishing the web versions of all essays from the first two issues of the anthology to this blog over the course of the next few months, but if you’d like to support the creation of more high-quality writing about adult games the full anthology is available for purchase on Itch! Anthology logo by Pillow!

Written By: blit

Heads up: this essay contains mentions of bondage, transformation, extreme size differences, and complicated consent.

Coziness in Games; An Exploration of Safety, Softness, and Satisfied Needs was published in 2017, and still shows up in gamedev discourse today. The business part of the title (aafer the semicolon) tells the reader what’s up: we’re here to talk about feeling safe, satisfied and soft.

• Coziness, to the authors, is safe. Cozy experiences are low risk, and often stress familiarity, reliability or openness to vulnerability.
• Coziness is, to the authors, abundant. Basic needs are being fulfilled – things like shelter, food, and water. This gives cozy experiences the time to focus on other needs, like connection, belonging, and intimacy.
• Coziness is, to the authors, soft. They’re talking about an aesthetic sense of softness here, the ways we use art to signal to someone that they can let their guard down, relax and move a little more slowly. Communication is authentic, sincere.

So, then, how do porn games help foster experiences like this? I’d like to talk about three adult games I’ve played and how I’ve found them cozy:

The Ditzy Demons Are in Love With Me is a visual novel by developer Smile. Our teenage cisgender straight male protagonist, Ren, finds himself in a dorm with a bunch of female “ditzy” “demons” and hooks up.

Girls!, Girls!, Girls!? is a visual novel by developer Myosuki. Our protagonist, who we get to name, finds himself at his first job: managing a otokonoko maid cafe. Sexy shenanigans and poor business accounting ensue.

Mice Tea is a visual novel by developer Cinnamon Switch. Our protagonist, Margret, finds a magical transforming batch of tea and gets herself turned into a mouse. Along the way, she also transforms her coworkers, and plenty of sex is had.

Coziness Is Safe

In a cozy game, little is at risk. AAA’s editor, Bigg, has written before about how VNs are well adapted to porn, but I think that same argument helps show why VNs help players feel safe– if I can take my hands off the controls for a little while to masturbate, then nothing too pressing can be threatening anyone I care about. A porn VN never asks me for a high level of mental investment to make sure everyone makes it out ok. You can always save right at the moment of a choice and scroll back through past dialog if you need it.

Ditzy Demons decides that even choices are too risky. Every route leads to a cozy, intimate and sexual relationship. The only choice the player makes, in the entire game, is with who. Mice Tea allows for routes to end without Margret hooking up, but only rarely, with a telegraphed choices, does she end up hurt. Girls has a bunch of choices, but for the most part just asks the player to be sexually interested in the maids, respect them, and favor one maid over the others to find a good ending. It doesn’t ask its players for much.

Safety is also clued in visually. All the scenes in all these games take place in well lit spaces, even at night. Spaces look warm, inviting: no harsh glare of direct sunlight and no deep shadows of night. This helps everything be visible, letting our animal hindbrains relax because nothing can sneak up on us.

Another thing that helps these games feel safe is the size of their locations. Most of the action in all these games takes place in small, comfortable rooms and shops. Barlow’s Books and Tea Friends in Mice Tea are shops that the cast work at and frequent, giving a sense that everyone is safe in these spaces because they know them well. The cafe in Girls is often likened to a haven in the writing, a place the maids know well, feel safe in, and where they can let their guard down.

Safety carries through to sexual writing. Mice Tea, even when it’s being kinky, has its characters check in on each other constantly during its sex scenes. Consent is negotiated throughout Margret’s sexual encounters, and helps even the extreme sex feel safe. No one is at risk, even when one person is bound and hooded.

I’m not convinced the other games do this as well. Consent gets the most dubious – and leads to the least safe feeling sex – in Ditzy Demons. Every main route has at least one scene where Ren decides to change a planned sexual encounter, usually to protests. Miyabi has a sex scene where she’s drugged, and it’s not clear if she’s in control of her facilities. Everyone decides that everything’s all right in the end, but a post-coital apology and cuddling afterward does little to that sick dread of “did you just hurt her?” that settles in my stomach. Negotiation before, and checking in during dulls that edge. Ultimately, when characters communicate in the bedroom, when they listen to each other and try to honor requests, the sex reads as warm, inviting and safe. Even when someone gets scratched by claws, or tweaks a nipple too hard.

Coziness Is Abundant

The sense of abundance ties in with one of safety – the things we need to satisfy our basic needs (food, water, shelter, etc) are abundant in cozy games. In Ditzy Demons, while living in the ditz dorm, every single member has their own, comfortably sized room. Arle has no trouble getting a sarcophagus shipped in because that’s what’s most comfortable for her to sleep in. Ren cooks for the dorm, and he always has enough food on hand to make sure everyone has a satisfying breakfast and dinner. Even when the narrative hints at money being tight, like in Girls, there’s still time and resources for a lavish party where everyone gets their fill of cakes and other pastries. All these games have time and passages to talk about how good things are to eat, and show characters snacking.

Everyone manages to own several, often complicated and you-must-have- gotten-that-custom outfits. Mice Tea has several shopping montages for clothes, Ditzy Demons is happy to show characters in plenty of outfits. Even if most of the characters in Girls are only shown in a few different styles of dress, the writing talks about how well all their clothes suit them. This is an abundance of clothing.

As alluded to back when we were talking about safety, there’s an abundance of time. The sun stays up just long enough to have a long romantic walk, the shops are open regardless of how long the characters dawdle to get there. Even during busy days in the cafe, characters have enough time to have a quick emotional scene together.

There’s an abundance of care – even when consent is getting questionable in Ditzy Demons, there are plenty of aftercare scenes. Characters dote on each other, the games are happy to let loved ones live rent free in their lovers heads. Gifts are given, often, and they’re heartfelt.

That care translates to an abundance of sex. The amount of labor this requires is astounding, but nowhere else in gaming can any protagonist get this much action in this many unique ways. Everyone fucks, for long periods of time, a lot. Across the games, partners are down for experimentation in the bedroom, happy to push their boundaries and try something new. Other porn tropes play to cozy strengths: sex is always fantastic in porn. Not only is everyone going to pound town, but they have a great time there.

A character might call themselves a slut, but it’s with pride. Girls, Girls, Girls’s “harem” ending is far closer to a full-throated embrace of polyamory than one might expect, where the girls all have sex with each other (and only the next day is the protagonist is pulled in join a second orgy as the screen fades to black). No one cheats; even if they’re all vying for his attention, everyone in the ditz dorm respects whoever Ren ends up settling with.

Coziness Is Soft

“Softness” is the hardest term to pin down in Coziness in Games. Sure, it means soft textures. All these games have passages where people rub their hands over beds or clothes and comment how nice and soft they feel. All these games talk about bodies being soft, warm, inviting things that are delightful to cuddle up against and squeeze.

That’s not quite the entire story, though. There’s also a sense of emotional softness, of being the kind of person who’s able to cry when a sad thing happens or express joy when a fun thing happens. There’s also a sense of slowness, that the characters can take the world at their own pace.

Sometimes this sense of softness comes through formal elements: common writing advice and giant-of-the-genre VN engine Renpy both want you to organize your VN into scenes. This gives natural and easy transition points that allow for cozy, smooth transitions. Ditzy Demons even provides a little visual bumper – something I associate with VN’s published by Denpasoft.

These transitions soften time and give the game a dreamlike pace. I’ve played through Ditzy Demons a lot and I could not tell you how long, temporally, the VN takes. Is it one school year? Just one summer? There’s enough time to do everything at your own pace in the world of Ditzy Demons because it’s not clear time is even passing. The world is soft, like a lazy dust mote suspended on a morning sunbeam.

Characters in VNs are emotionally open. When someone is sad in any of these games, they cry. When they’re having great sex, they moan about it. The art and writing go out of their way to lay feelings bare. Along these lines, these VNs have male protagonists doing domestic work, caring for the people around them. Ditzy Demon’s Ren does the invisible labor for the ditz dorm: he cleans, he cooks, he shops, he helps take care of their pets. Girls’ protagonist manager starts out by not doing any cooking for the cafe, but wants to – he spends passages wishing he could help. Through the course of the novel, he learns how to cook from the group, and it dovetails nicely with his own softening character growth.

There are parts of Girls that are not cozy: through the runtime of the VN, it comes to light that the protagonist is withholding financial information from the maids of the cafe. The cafe is in dire financial straits; the maids suspect this. The player character lies about it. He does this out of a sense of obligation: he needs to be hard and tough for the cafe and can’t worry them.

The protagonist also feels disconnected. They’re not sure of themselves; they don’t know their place in the world, and are looking for a sense of community. The plot forces the player character to come clean and apologize. It’s by becoming softer and vulnerable, that the protagonist is able to be accepted as a member of the maid’s tight-knit group. He’s given a chance to put in the legwork and atone for his lying and save the cafe.

It’s the only game of the three that features someone longing for coziness and changing to become cozy themselves. It might be the only video game I’ve ever played that features this as its narrative arc. I’m a sucker for a redemption story, and to have one played out entirely based on interpersonal connections and softness in porn is delightful.

There’s another side to all this cozyness, as well. The Coziness in Games authors acknowledge that making things comfortable, or using comfort as a reward, can be dangerous. It’s “Comfort is a Weapon” that nails it, though. When we make a space cozy, we set it aside from the rest of the world: we draw a boundary and include the things we like and exclude the things we don’t like. If we want to engage with cozy media, we must ask: who or what is on the outside?

Anime has a long history with race, porn has a long history with conventionally attractive bodies (and also race). Ditzy Demons and Girls aren’t breaking any new ground on either axis– its characters read as white (to me), with supermodel body shapes. Mice Tea brings more color and bodies into its cozy spaces, but all the characters still read as upper middle class. And although Margret and Julie are pudgier, plenty of lines still have Margret fretting about her weight. I’m not the smartest bunny, but I’d imagine hearing about weight watching can take someone right out of a cozy headspace fast. I also have to at least acknowledge that it’s considered a character flaw that the girls in Ditzy Demons let Ren do the cooking. No one explicitly says it, and Ren admits to himself that he likes doing chores, but the subtext is there: the girls should be doing this domestic labor.

I think it’s important to take extra care with cozy porn. Cozy porn pieces don’t just say “bodies like this get to have sex and attention” in their subtext. They also say “bodies like this get to feel like they belong.”

Ultimately, though, I’m writing this because I like cozy porn a lot. Once I played Nekopara Vol 1 in 2018, this became the genre I come back to most. I hope that game designers, authors, visual artists, composers and all the other folks required to make a game keep making more cozy adult games– I’ve got a weighted blanket and a mug of tea, and will never get tired of intimate, cozy relations.

Blit is a programmer, musician and writer who pretends to be a funny animal person online. He hopes that writing about porn instead of computer code will finally make all his digital humanities professors proud.

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