Article Spotlight - Confetti’s Cozy Corner: Interview with Jenny Windom of Wholesome Direct
While I'm heading into a fresh new week of my Blaugust journey this month, it turns out I'm still in the mood to blog about video game culture. It's actually because of Blaugust that I stumbled across today's blogging topic! Since this festival has got me clicking around and browsing through corners of the internet that I usually wouldn't stumble across, I've been encountering lots of wonderful new work and creative folks to check out. That's how I ended up listening to this great conversation of Milady Confetti interviewing Jenny Windom of Wholesome Games, available on Milady Confetti's channel, "Wholesome Games: A Movement of Hope with @Kimchica of @WholesomeGames". For the purposes of this blog post, I'll also be referring to the written version of this interview, which can be found as an article in Milady Confetti's column for Gayming Magazine, "Confetti’s Cozy Corner: Interview with Jenny Windom of Wholesome Direct". Their conversation was a great way to kick off the current "Wholesome Games Celebration", happening now from August 7 - August 14 on Steam, which features a thoughtfully curated selection of "world premiere game announcements, new releases, discounts, and demos".
Even though I don't have a ton of experience playing the kind of games that usually fall under the label of wholesome, or the closely associated yet distinct label of cozy, I've always really loved that the space for these games exists, and the people who work hard to create that. Life and social simulators for being a small-time farmer or café owner; visual novels to live out enough relationship fantasies for multiple lifetimes; gentle exploration where you're just a lil guy wandering a big but ultimately benevolent world. Often able to eschew more of the toxic masculinity and other problematic "isms" of many mainstream games, these are some of the kinds of games that many queer communities, women, and otherwise marginalized folks in gaming have been able to find a home in. So it's also a neat un-surprise that there tends to be a lot of visible overlap between the wholesome or cozy game scene and the indie game scene, too.
I especially appreciated listening to Windom get into the nuances of what "wholesome" can actually mean. Wholesomeness can be easily diluted down to toxic positivity, or the type of coziness where nothing bad can, should, or ever will happen. Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with enjoying that kind of coziness, and there are times when it can, in fact, be exactly what is needed (Animal Crossing: New Horizons circa March 2020, anyone?). But it can also be a disservice to ourselves if it's the only thing we ever pursue, solely seeking out comfort for the sake of personal ignorance and complacent escapism. So I loved how Windom instead described wholesomeness as being rooted in a sense of hopefulness based on taking action and on being fully, safely, present in what you're engaging with. She puts it into words excellently like this:
"Wholesome, on the other hand, is a much broader concept for me, built on a foundation of safety. This means safety to explore the game’s mechanics and world without fear of jump scares or violence, but it’s also about the safety to engage with challenging emotional topics. A game like Spiritfarer is a great example; it deals with death and grief, but it does so in a way that allows you to safely process those heavy emotions.
That sense of safety ties directly into the other key components: hope and approachability. A wholesome game leaves you with a feeling of warmth and encouragement, even when its themes are tough."
Considering the other threads of video game culture that I've been pondering lately, including the somewhat still persistent discourse of having to prove that video games should be respected as "real" experiences of artistic and cultural significance, this feels like an important piece of it. How exactly do games facilitate impactful emotional experiences for us? What is uniquely powerful about having those experiences specifically through video games? I think there is a lot to learn from the wholesome games space in this regard. By proactively offering both emotional immersion and safety, wholesome video games invite us to willingly let our guard down and thus open up to potentially new and challenging experiences — and, in doing so, to also grow or learn something from it.