Tristan J. Tarwater argues that cozy games are built on colonial values and that developers have an obligation to remove them. Here is where several of those arguments break down.
THE TITLE CLAIM: “Decolonizing Cozy Games”
Cozy games have thin representation and that is worth discussing. But the claim that their defaults are colonial impositions rather than cultural expressions does not hold up.
The talk never defends the leap from “this is a Western cultural default” to “this is a colonial value that must be removed,” and that gap is the entire argument.
VIDEO SCORECARD
This talk uses a real observation, that cozy games lack diversity, and then uses the emotional weight of decolonization language to push conclusions that the evidence never actually proves.
Watch the original talk, then read why the argument doesn’t hold up.
HOW TO READ THIS TABLE
- Completely Unfounded The conclusion is logically invalid regardless of whether the facts are true.
- Deliberately Misleading The facts cited are real but are used to create a false impression.
- Exaggerated There is truth here but the conclusion goes further than the evidence allows.
THE QUICK VERDICT
| Argument Made | Fallacy Used | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Western cultural defaults like corn, winter, and nuclear families are colonial values baked into cozy games. | Equivocation (switching the meaning of a word mid-argument to make two different things seem the same) | Exaggerated |
| The outsider-saves-the-town story structure is a colonialist narrative. | Single-Cause Fallacy (assigning one cause to something that has many independent origins) | Completely Unfounded |
| Cozy games must be redesigned so every cultural background feels safe and at home. | Nirvana Fallacy (comparing a real, flawed thing to a perfect ideal that is never shown to be achievable) | Exaggerated |
| Game developers generally should audit and rebuild their cultural defaults. | Overgeneralization (treating a partial pattern as a universal rule that applies to everyone) | Deliberately Misleading |
What the Talk Is About
Tristan J. Tarwater is a game consultant who presented this talk at the Game Devs of Color Expo. The argument is that cozy games, the farming, building, and community simulation genre, carry colonial values in their mechanics, narratives, and aesthetics. The proposed fix is a series of design questions developers should ask themselves before defaulting to what feels familiar.
Tarwater is a clear and engaging speaker. The observation that representation in cozy games is thin is accurate. The point that “safety” in games is culturally constructed is worth taking seriously as a design consideration.
But a few of the core arguments don’t prove what they claim to prove. And those gaps matter.
[[2:24]] Calling Western cultural defaults “colonial values”
“This is the process by which an institution, practice, or industry has colonial values and practices removed. This includes things like education, food ways, creating, preparing and growing food, transportation, raising kids with our partners or with our communities and, yes, storytelling and game making.”
Tristan J. Tarwater, 2:24
FALLACY DETECTED
Switching the Meaning of a Word Mid-Argument
(Equivocation / Loaded Language)
This fallacy uses the same word in two different ways to make two different things seem like the same thing.
How it appears here: The talk defines colonialism as a real historical process of exploitation and forced cultural erasure. Then it labels corn, winter, four seasons, and nuclear families as “colonial.” But those are just features of Northern Hemisphere temperate culture. A developer from Toronto including winter in their game is expressing their own culture. Calling that colonial is a different use of the word, and the swap never gets defended.
The talk defines decolonization correctly at the start. It is the removal of colonial structures, things imposed by force on cultures that had their own systems. That is a serious and meaningful concept.
Then the talk applies that definition to corn. And winter. And the Gregorian calendar. These are not colonial impositions on a developer from a temperate region. They are that developer’s own culture. A game dev in Ontario including snow in their game is doing exactly what Tarwater says African devs should be free to do: building from their own defaults.
The word “colonial” is doing two jobs here and the talk never acknowledges the switch. One job is describing historical violence. The other is describing “things that are common in Western games.” Those are not the same job.
Ask the same question in reverse. If an African studio made a farming game set in a dry savanna with cassava and two rainy seasons, nobody would call that colonial. They would call it authentic. A Western studio making the same choice about their own environment deserves the same reading.
Bottom line: Western cultural defaults in games are real. Calling them colonial requires an argument the talk never makes.
[[12:33]] The outsider-saves-the-town structure is a colonialist narrative
“The idea that the people who lived in a place for decades who know the area, who know the land, who know everyone that’s there, and then the idea that they don’t know how to use their resources well and they can’t fix their own problems is a colonialist narrative.”
Tristan J. Tarwater, 12:33
FALLACY DETECTED
One Cause Assigned to Something With Many Origins
(Single-Cause Fallacy)
This fallacy assumes one cause explains something that actually has many independent origins.
How it appears here: The outsider-saves-the-community story structure shows up in pre-colonial West African oral traditions, Japanese mythology, ancient Mesopotamian epics, and Greek myth. It did not come from colonialism. Calling it colonial assigns one cause to a story shape that humans across every culture invented independently.
The outsider-saves-the-town structure is one of the oldest narrative shapes on earth. It predates colonialism by thousands of years and appears across every major storytelling tradition independently.
In pre-colonial West African oral tradition alone, this structure appears repeatedly. Kirikou, a precocious outsider, breaks a sorceress’s curse on his village because the elders were too afraid to act. Anansi the trickster spider, an outsider to the social order, steals fire and agriculture from the gods to save struggling human communities. The Mocked Outcast travels into the wilderness and returns with the solution to a drought that paralyzed the people who actually lived there. The Hunter and the River Spirit, an external wanderer, brokers peace between a vengeful water spirit and a local village. These are not Western imports. They are indigenous African stories that use the exact structure Tarwater calls colonial.
The same pattern appears in Momotaro and Urashima Taro in Japan, in Beowulf arriving from across the sea to save Heorot, in Moses as outsider-deliverer, in Gilgamesh. The structure is universal because it maps onto a universal human experience: sometimes the person who fixes something is the one who arrived without prior assumptions.
There is also an internal contradiction here. The talk recommends Fields of Mistria as a positive example of decolonized design. Fields of Mistria runs on the exact same mechanic: you arrive as an outsider and improve the town. If the structure is colonial, Tarwater’s own recommended game is colonial. The talk cannot have it both ways.
The outsider structure is also, more simply, the genre’s core gameplay loop. Remove it and you do not have a decolonized cozy game. You have no game. The improvement arc from arrival to flourishing community is what cozy games are.
Bottom line: this story structure exists in pre-colonial African, Asian, and Middle Eastern traditions. Colonialism did not invent it and cannot own it.
[[9:12]] Cozy games must make every cultural background feel safe
“We’re making games for big audiences and we don’t all face the same dangers or threats in real life, and what is familiar is gonna be different from person to person depending on their cultural backgrounds. If safety’s built on familiarity, we have to think about culture in a deep way to make cozy games hit for more audiences.”
Tristan J. Tarwater, 9:12
FALLACY DETECTED
Comparing a Real Thing to a Perfect Ideal That Cannot Exist
(Nirvana Fallacy)
This fallacy judges a real option against a perfect standard that is never shown to be achievable.
How it appears here: No single game can make every cultural background feel at home at the same time. A game built around Nigerian harvest traditions will feel unfamiliar to someone from rural Japan. A game built around Japanese seasons will feel unfamiliar to someone from coastal West Africa. The talk sets up universal cultural safety as an obligation without ever showing it is possible or addressing what it costs to attempt it.
Early in the talk, Tarwater makes a useful comparison. She says horror games use mechanics, narrative, and aesthetics to create a feeling, and nobody dismisses horror games for doing that well. She is right. But she never follows that comparison to its conclusion.
Nobody argues that horror games must accommodate players who find darkness unsafe. The genre contract is clear. You know what you are getting. Cozy games have a genre contract too. The temperate seasons, the small towns, the farming loops, these are not just cultural impositions. They are genre signals. They tell a player what kind of experience to expect.
Tarwater herself invites this comparison at 1:54. The logic she applies to horror games applies equally to cozy games. A genre is allowed to be itself.
The market has also already answered this question. Venba exists. Saltsea Chronicles exists. Games built around specific cultural frameworks find their audiences without anyone mandating it. The mechanism Tarwater wants already works at the scale where it makes economic sense. Nobody stopped those games from being made.
Bottom line: universal cultural safety in a single game is not achievable. The market already produces culturally specific games for audiences who want them.
[[17:55]] Game developers generally should rebuild their cultural defaults
“We have to remember that our workflows and our businesses that we all work for were built by colonizers and their descendants and they’re meant to exploit and to extract.”
Tristan J. Tarwater, 17:55
FALLACY DETECTED
Treating a Partial Pattern as a Rule for Everyone
(Overgeneralization)
This fallacy takes something true in some cases and applies it as if it is true in all cases.
How it appears here: The talk addresses “game developers” as one category with the same obligations and the same resources. A 5-person indie studio and a 500-person AAA publisher are not the same thing. Their target markets, budgets, and audience obligations are completely different. The talk never makes this distinction once.
The talk is presented at a diversity-focused indie expo. The actual audience is small, independent developers who chose to attend. But the obligations described in the talk are framed as applying to the industry broadly.
A large studio with $150 million in sunk costs cannot rationally target a niche cultural market. Their survival depends on the largest shared cultural denominator of their actual audience, which is North America, Europe, China, and Japan. That is not colonialism. That is a business serving the market that actually buys its product.
The costs the talk never addresses are real. Building an authentic cultural system you do not have native knowledge of requires outside research, cultural consultation, new asset creation, and additional QA testing. Done badly, it causes more offense than doing nothing. The talk proposes new systems that do not yet exist in the genre and never once mentions what building them from scratch actually takes.
The talk also never engages with the genre’s actual origins. The cozy farming game was built largely by Japanese studios, Harvest Moon, Story of Seasons, targeting Western markets. Those studios included four seasons, corn, and nuclear families because that is what their target audience recognized. Calling those defaults colonial ignores that a non-Western studio put them there deliberately for market reasons. The framework has no answer for that.
Bottom line: the obligations described in this talk only apply to a specific type of studio with a specific type of audience. The talk never names that studio or makes the distinction.
To Be Fair
FAIR POINT
Representation in cozy games is genuinely thin
The visual and cultural homogeneity of the cozy genre is documentable and real. Most games in the genre default to white characters, temperate Northern Hemisphere settings, and Western European aesthetic frameworks. That is worth naming. The causes, studio demographics, market size, and development economics – are more complicated than the talk suggests, but the pattern itself is accurate.
The talk’s central claim is that cozy game developers are perpetuating colonial values through their design defaults and have an obligation to remove them. That claim requires two things to be true. First, that cultural defaults in games are colonial impositions rather than authentic cultural expressions. Second, that the obligation to change them applies broadly across the industry. Neither holds up.
A developer builds from what they know. A studio in Helsinki includes snow. A studio in Lagos includes heat and dry seasons. A studio in Kyoto includes cherry blossoms. None of those choices is more or less colonial than the others. They are all developers expressing the world they live in. The talk only identifies one of those as requiring correction, and never defends why.
The talk also frames the cozy genre’s defaults as a Western imposition, but the genre was largely built by Japanese studios designing for Western markets. Harvest Moon was not made by colonizers. It was made by a Japanese team that studied what Western audiences found comforting and built accordingly. That is audience targeting. Calling the result colonial redefines the word past usefulness.
Horror games are not asked to include cozy mechanics so players who dislike darkness feel safe. The genre contract is understood. Cozy games deserve the same logic. The genre’s defaults are part of the signal that tells a player what kind of experience they are opting into. Changing those defaults does not decolonize the genre. It changes what the genre is.
WHAT THE VIDEO LEFT OUT
- The genre was built by Japanese studios, not Western ones. Harvest Moon and Story of Seasons, the foundations of the cozy farming genre, were made by Japanese developers targeting Western markets, which the colonial framework has no explanation for.
- Studio size determines what is feasible. A 5-person team and a 500-person publisher do not have the same budget, audience, or obligations, and the talk never distinguishes between them.
- Authentic cultural systems cost real money to build. Research, cultural consultation, new assets, and extra QA time all have price tags, and building them wrong causes more harm than not building them at all.
- The market already produces culturally specific games voluntarily. Venba, the talk’s own best example, was a small low-cost indie game that found its audience without any mandate. That model does not scale to AAA budgets.
- The outsider-saves-the-town structure exists in pre-colonial African stories. Kirikou, Anansi, the Mocked Outcast, and the Hunter and the River Spirit all use this exact structure, which means the genre’s core loop was not invented by colonizers.
- No equivalent pressure applies to non-Western studios. Nobody asks Japanese studios to add African seasonal systems or asks African indie devs to include winter. The obligation only runs in one direction and the talk never explains why.
- The talk never engages with commercial outcomes. Whether any of these proposed changes correlate with larger audiences or greater sales is never addressed, and for studios that must turn a profit, that omission is significant.
The Bottom Line
This video used these logical fallacies to try to make you believe that cozy games are built on colonial values that developers are obligated to remove.
- Switching the meaning of “colonial” to make cultural expression look like ideological imposition
- Assigning one cause to a universal story structure that every human culture invented independently
- Comparing real games to a perfect standard of universal cultural safety that cannot exist
- Applying an obligation that only makes sense for some studios as if it applies to all of them
What to listen for next time: when a talk uses a serious word like “colonialism” to describe things that predate colonialism or exist across all cultures, that is the moment to pause. The word is doing work the evidence cannot support. The music and the confident delivery make it feel solid. The habit to build is asking whether the definition at the start of the argument is still the definition being used at the end.
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