Palia.
I am not what one might call a “serious gamer,” in the sense that somehow—despite loving an intellectual challenge—I have never had much patience for puzzles. Even the puzzles of knowing how, for example, to run instead of walk in a game, which button allows you to rotate tools and where exactly you need to shoot in order to kill the monster before it kills you are ones that I do not always stick around long enough to figure out. I love a story, I love a lesson, but I have never been that good at games.
That said, I’ve always been a “light gamer,” if we want to call it that. I’ve always hovered around video games (and electronics in general—since I was a kid, I’ve had an inexplicable attraction to Best Buy). During the craze of quarantine, I went out of my way to find a Nintendo Switch when they were pretty much sold out, and the only reason I didn’t get one was because the one Switch left like an hour and a half away from where I was living at the time in Nashville got bought up before I could work up the nerve to buy it myself (my bank account was screaming at me to grow up).
I ended up getting a Switch after they become reasonably easy to get again, but sold it when I moved to Atlanta because I could use the extra cash, plus I figured being in grad school, I wouldn’t have much time to play it anyway. When I finally had the stability—both time-wise and money-wise—to buy and keep a Switch, I did, and I’ve loved having one ever since.
I am an aspiring “cozy gamer,” especially because of this cool Black cozy gamer on Youtube, who convinced me (I am highly susceptible to influencers) that playing gentle video games is a loving way to take care of yourself. Games where you farm and you unpack (shoutout to the game Unpacking) and you make coffee. Games where there usually isn’t much running and rarely any shooting and if there is a puzzle to solve, you can spend all of the time in the world trying to figure it out.
The game I’ve been playing lately is called Palia, and even though I’m just now starting to carve out enough time to play it for real, I’ve found it to be comforting because while it is this (at least to me) enormous world and you have all of these responsibilities like learning how to garden and how to make things and how to build relationships with other people in the town, there is also a to-do list on the side of the screen that you can approach at your leisure. There is both a map and a compass that guides you to where you need to go next. Your garden will not wither if you don’t water it for a while, but it also won’t grow until you do. I don’t know how to explain it exactly, but I’m weirdly comforted by the organization of this game, the gentle way it leads you in the right direction without pressure and without assuming you know what to do.
In the midst of this time in my life where I’m taking this big test for school and I’m teaching a class on writing and I generally feel like I have a lot going on—it’s nice to remember that things will get accomplished eventually. That there is (or can be) an organization to things that will help bring you through, and when that organization—that mounting to-do list—feels overwhelming, you are allowed to take a second, to sit down and get lost in another world.
I like the world of Palia especially because the graphics remind me of Sims (another video game that was exactly my speed), except this world is also mythological—everyone is kind of a mythical hipster, it seems like. The music is soothing, and you are free to run around but you are also told where to go, and if you listen, you end up with a house and a garden and who knows what else (I’m still figuring it out). I like the peace of a world like that and the peace it brings back into my own when—after taking a break, playing a game, solidifying my identity as a “light, aspiring cozy gamer”—I can get back to organizing and working toward my own goals and dreams.
Image: Singularity 6 Corporation
