Nurturing games
I worked at Tencent in a variety of roles from 2011 through 2016, when I was transferred to a Tencent subsidiary. They changed my job description about once every six months. I started as a writer for Facebook games, then became a market researcher (??), then became an entry-level producer in bizdev.
The market research roles taught me a lot about how mobile game stores in China discussed genre. We constantly struggled to explain games to our colleagues in Shenzhen - the genre names commonly used in the US did not match up exactly to the genre names on Tencent's stores. The US had more fine gradations of RPG, with names that players in China were unfamiliar with. (I remember a huge fight over the exact meaning of the term "action RPG".) Meanwhile, there were entire top-level genres on Tencent mobile app stores that US players would not have bothered to identify. I strongly remember someone showing me a top-level genre of arcade fishing games at one point.
The big one, though, was "Nurturing Games." Nurturing games encompassed a wide variety of mechanical genres - farming, pet-raising, some types of business sim, life sim, etc - and were united only by that extremely vague "nurturing" verb. At first, this drove me absolutely fucking nuts. I wanted genres to point out mechanical similarities, not aesthetic genres or "story" genres. It seemed as ridiculous to me to sell games out of a "Nurturing" bucket as it would to sell them out of a "Sci-Fi" bucket. (It didn't occur to me that "Horror" works the same way, as a genre.)
I believed that mechanical genres were necessary information at the top level of a game store because player preferences are driven by their skill and comfort with mechanical genres. I know a lot of people who cannot play games with twitch response times. They use genre names like "action RPG" and "fighting" and "platforming" to know what to avoid.
I still believe that this information is crucial, but I now understand that genre names are as much a marketing tool as they are purely informational for players. Using multiple genre names on a store page at once can allow publishers to tag their products both with informational genre names and names which are basically just marketing.
And through a certain lens, marketing terms can also be highly informational to a player. Many players want to buy games which reinforce their sense of self. They are looking for games which feel personally or socially acceptable for them to play, basically - games which "say" to them, "You are the one meant to play me. Your gender, ideology, age, and interests are Correct for me. I'll never speak to you in a way that makes you feel less like yourself."
Most people react very, very strongly to stuff like this, even if they think they do not.
"Wholesome" is a marketing term which fulfills this role.
There's been chatter for the better part of a decade about "wholesome" as a marketing term. Small groups of people online criticize it, then participants in that scene are outraged. It continues, apparently, to attract an audience of people who believe that the term "wholesome" reinforces their sense of self.
To get this out of the way - I personally hate the term. I don't think the people who use it are necessarily wicked, but I think that only a sick society could, in the middle of a dozen different moral panics about sexuality, embrace a marketing campaign focused on the term "wholesome." Using that term is using the enemy's weapons!
However, I'm absolutely in the target audience for a lot of "wholesome" games! I am a 37 year old woman who started a balcony garden during lockdown. I love Pokemon and will gladly play another game with cute animals, and pet-rearing mechanics, and farming gameplay, or what have you. My favorite recent citybuilder is Timberborn, the cute beaver city game. I am playing the shit out of Pokopia right now. If you consider the way I spend money, or the products I like, I am dead center in the target audience for a lot of the stuff marketing itself as "wholesome."
But I hate the term! Hearing it applied to the games I like makes me feel less like myself. I dislike the moral claim it makes - that these games are morally superior or morally pure. The idea that my interests should be seen through a lens of how "wholesome" they are is just politically repulsive to me.
I genuinely think that the people using this term should discard it. One thing to pay attention to is that "cozy" doesn't get half the heat that "wholesome" does - because it's more descriptive and accurate, for one, but also because it doesn't contain a moral judgement. There are loads of terms which are probably more effective at providing information to players while also reinforcing their sense of self. There's a great one sitting right there: "nurturing"!
The greatest pitch I can make for "nurturing" is that it is much more descriptive. Nurturing describes the relationship that the player has with things, people, communities, and creatures in many different cozy or "wholesome" games. It also illuminates the power fantasy that a lot of these games are actually fulfilling.
Cozy games where you take care of something are absolutely power fantasies - they are simply power fantasies which are gendered and socially bounded in a way that makes them permissible for femme people to pursue. The fantasy of being a family head whom everyone relies on, the person who can solve everyone's problems and is rewarded obediently every time with gratitude and love... that is a form of power that many, many people desire!
The reason people look for these aesthetic, political, or self-affirming marketing terms is that they are often the only way to describe this desire. The fantasy of being The Mom Whom Everyone Loves can't be summed up by a mechanical genre. The duties of running a community or a family or a farm are so complex that they can be represented by many different mechanics in many different games. If you want the power fantasy of saving a town, healing a pet from illness, choosing and marrying a perfect spouse... then you need terms like "cozy" or "nurturing" to find that fantasy in a game store. "Nurturing" hits very specifically at the verb which forms the heart of that power fantasy. Cozy just is a state of being... "nurturing" is something that you do.
I wanted to describe these games as power fantasies because I wanted to strip some of the sense that this verb is somehow more morally pure or righteous than the verb of fighting or killing. Most games about killing take care to make sure the player thinks of their violence as morally righteous, necessary, and socially valuable. They are doing the same work as a lot of these "wholesome" games, but their rhetoric is aimed at a different group of people with different values.
There is a line on the Wholesome Games website where they attempt to negotiate the role that killing has in a "wholesome" genre. Although they seem to accept that you could wholesomely kill an oppressor, stories that deeply explore violent struggle against oppression are not really the kind of thing that these showcases ever actually feature. But this is the corner they've painted themselves into with the moral framing - instead of describing the power fantasy, they're doing the rhetorical work of justifying the power fantasy. And unfortunately this is the exact same work that other people do to justify all those violent games the "wholesome" audience isn't actually interested in.
Just describe the power fantasy! It's the fantasy of caretaking, or of nurturing. Choose a word that sounds snappy enough in English, and you're off to the races. Why put yourself into dialogue with games about killing? You are providing a completely different power fantasy with a completely different social role.