Jenn Padilla

Training Buddy

Training Buddy is a fitness-focused virtual pet mobile game I have worked on since concept by myself. The game is a source of motivation and discipline for players who wish to exercise more.

This project is still a work in progress. Everything is here up except the "Designing" phase.

6 weeks+

UX/UI Designer

Comfort
Games

Come with me on a deep dive into the concept of comfort games. Through user research, I answer questions about what a comfort game is, what makes a comfort game a comfort game, and how to evaluate comfort game potential. All research is fueled
by personal curiosity.

14 weeks

Solo

Role:

UX Researcher

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim © Bethesda Game Studios, 2011. Verified Comfort Game

Minecraft © Mojang Studios, 2011. Verified Comfort Game

On the home page:

Stardew Valley @ ConcernedApe, 2016. Verified Comfort Game.
Valorant © Riot Games, 2020. Verified Comfort Game

In this case study, I’ll be answering the questions below through secondary and user research that includes surveys, interviews, and observational inquiries.

What is a Comfort Game?

What makes a Comfort Game a Comfort Game?

How can we evaluate the Comfort Game Potential in a game?

What's Next?

What is...?

What is a Comfort Game?

"A Comfort Game is a game a player revisits multiple times because it's comfortable to play."

Can you think of a game for yourself? This is most likely a game you know like the back of your hand. You can turn it on and forget about the rest of the world. Who knows how many hours you've given this title.

What a Comfort Game is not

We are not talking about cozy games. Cozy describes a genre of games that aim to be, well, cozy. Comfort games are unique to each individual and can be part of any genre. Cozy games generally have high CGP (Comfort Game Potential), but a game is not a comfort game unless a player labels them as such.

Disney Dreamlight Valley © Gameloft , 2022.

Ranked Genres

As you can see, basically every genre is present. From my perspective, the most notable genres absent are battle royale and interactive movies. That doesn't mean they're off the table, though. I believe they would show with enough participants. This data comes from my user research of 209 Comfort Games.

Graph of all the comfort game genres. Action, Adventure, and RPG are the top, Stealth, Rhythm, and Visual Novel are at the bottom.

Top Franchises

Top Games

Why Should You Care?

Comfort games bring players immense joy and a way to escape. Being labeled as a comfort game is quite an achievement. On top of that, Comfort games are profitable. According to my survey:

74% of players have or would buy paid-DLC, in-game purchases, sequels, or spin-offs of their comfort game
72% of players have or would buy merchandise related to their comfort game
95% of players recommend their comfort game.

Why Do I Care?

It's so cool! I find the concept of Comfort Games very interesting! I love hearing about players' bonds with their Comfort Game.

It’s like asking someone who or what their main is in a game. The answer is backed up by personal preferences and memories. You can get to know someone a bit better through it.

This study has been a lot of fun for me.

What makes...?

What Makes a Comfort Game a Comfort Game?

To get to the bottom of the question, I conducted user research. For my user research, I conducted seven interviews and a survey with 112 participants. Half of the interviews were observational inquiries, interviews that were conducted while the interviewee was playing their Comfort Game.

You can pause videos by clicking

Interviews

I did most of my interviews before the survey to feel out the running themes between players’ comfort games.

Why Observational Inquiries?

Having the interviewee present the game and guide me through reveals their values. The Super Smash Bros. Ultimate fan spent a lot of time showing me the music and how much control he had over when and what played, but he glossed over the story mode.

You would think the interviewees would have trouble talking and playing at the same time, but unexpectedly, the interviewees knew their comfort game so well that playing it didn’t distract their train of thought.

Super Smash Bros Ultimate © Nintendo, 2018. Verified Comfort Game

I went through each interview and extracted noteworthy themes. Below are the themes I discovered.

I found that the interviews had four common themes running through them.

High Familiarity

The players know their Comfort Game inside out.

Euro Truck Simulator 2 © SCS Software, 2012. Verified Comfort Game.

Low Stress Levels

Player’s time with their comfort game is
an overall relaxing time.

Night in the Woods © Finji, 2017. Verified Comfort Game.

Mostly Predictable

Players can mostly predict how their Comfort

Game plays out, but there’s a small portion

of the game the players can’t predict.

Tetris Retro © Lazy Mutt Games, 2023. Tetris is a verified Comfort Game.

Nostalgic

Players playing their Comfort Games rekindle positive memories from any point of their life of earlier interactions with the game, previous entries in the series, or outside factors present during earlier interactions with their Comfort Games.

All the nostalgia the players felt for their Comfort Game was tied to their experience with the game or franchise. No one expressed retro-revival nostalgia like how Yooka-Laylee is meant to provoke nostalgia for 3D collectathon, platformers.

Streets of Rage © SEGA, 1991. Verified Comfort Game.

Originally there was a fifth theme, Low Difficulty, but the survey proved that players' Comfort Games varied in difficulty.

With the information I gathered from the interviews, I formed the questions for the survey. I expected many of the results, like the survey backing up the themes above, but a few caught me by surprise. Here's a look at the more interesting findings.

Surveys

71% of players were minors when they first played their Comfort Game.
4 was the youngest age at which a player first played their Comfort Game, while 40 was the oldest.
The amount of thought it takes players to play their Comfort Game is mostly low.
Most players consider their Comfort Game addicting.
Most players claim their Comfort Game relaxes them and brings them joy.
The amount of nostalgia players felt for their Comfort Game wasn’t consistent, but 78% felt nostalgia to some extent.

Hades © Supergaint Games, 2020. Verified Comfort Game.

How to evaluate...?

How can we evaluate the Comfort Game Potential in a game?

With the magic of math! Algebra, specifically. I created an equation for each of the four themes and a fifth equation to tie all the themes into one value, a CGP (Comfort Game Potential) value.

CGP is a 1-100 value that measures the Comfort Game Potential between an individual player and a game. If you can recruit multiple players and get them to fill out a version of the short survey to the right, you can find a CGP range for that game.

To the right is the survey template that goes along the equations. To download the pdf, click the paper icon with a downward arrow or click here.

1. How familiar are you with the game?

f_(1)= the answer to question #1

F_(2)=10*2.7^(f_(1)-10)

Shenmue © SEGA, 1999. Vertified Comfort Game.

2. How stressful is the game?

s_(1) = the answer to quetion #2

S_(2)=-0.8s_(1)+8, if s_(1)=1 then S_(2)=10

Journey © Thatgamecompany, 2012. Vertified Comfort Game.

3. How predictable is the game?

p_(1)= the answer to question #3

P_(2)=(1)/(1.9\sqrt(2\pi ))*47.626*2.7^(-0.5(((p_(1)-9))/(1.9))^(2))

Portal 2 © Valve, 2011. Vertified Comfort Game.

take-this-absolutely-normal-sonic-3-screenshot-v0-zcj1q3eyj2ba1.webp

4. Is the game nostalgic?

n_(1)= the answer to question #4

If n_(1)=yes, then N_(2)=10. If n_(1)=no, then N_(2)=0

Sonic 3 & Knuckles © SEGA, 1994. Vertified Comfort Game.

What is the Comfort Game Potential (CGP)?

CGP=(2.59)F_(2)+(2.12)S_(2)+(2.54)P_(2)+(2.75)N_(2)

Solving the Equations

If you don’t want to do the math by hand, and I’m going to go out on a limb and assume you don’t, you have two options. You can copy the text under each image of the equations and paste it into Mathway, a calculator website. Just substitute your value from the survey, and it’ll solve it for you.

OR, you can use my cheat sheet. The cheat sheet has all the equations and the answers to them. It even does part of the last CGP equation, so the only math you’ll have to do is add. It only gives values based on whole numbers, though. If your player gives you an 8.5, you’ll have to use Mathway.

The Math Behind the Equations

In the below graph, only 8.9% of people picked 8 versus 65.2% of people who picked 10. Technically, everyone who filled out this survey is 100% correct because they filled it out with their Comfort Game in mind. But! For the sake of explaining my methods, some choices are more “correct” than others. The idea is that the more popular an answer is in my survey, the more “correct” that answer is. The graphs are the key.

The graph above shows players who picked 10 are more “correct” than those who picked 8. Within this graph, 10 is the most “correct” answer, so we’re going to convert that 65.2% to 100%, with the value being “10.” So anyone who picks 10 for this question is 100% “correct,” and they get the max value, “10.” Now we convert the rest of the numbers to stay proportionate to 10’s new value and get the new graph pictured below. 8 is now 13.7% “correct” with a value of “1.37.” Every player who picks 8 for this question currently gets a “F” value of “1.37”.

Same graph as before, but the values have been swapped.

To find the equation, I entered the values from the graph above into a website called Desmos. In Desmos, I can create a function and tweak it with sliders. I tweaked the equation until the line best represented the points I entered. So for this graph, an exponential function is the most fitting function we can use.

Previous graph, but with a line going through some of the points

We now have the equation y=10*2.7^(x-10).

Some of the values change with the new equation. The line goes through both 8 and 10, so their values, “1.37” and “10”, stay the same. 6 had a value of “0.27” in the last graph, but now, when we put 6 into the equation, we get the value “0.29”.

I repeat the process with the other questions. Stress Levels, on the left, best fits a line; however, 1 abruptly peaks to a value of 10. That is why there is an amendment in that equation. Predictability, on the right, is a bell curve with a peak over 9.

The final equation has each value from the previous equations multiplied by their percentage of the whole. I got those percentages by finding the “magnitude” of each question from my survey and dividing it by all the magnitudes combined. The magnitudes come from adding each answer’s value within a question together. Nostalgia has the strongest magnitude, while stress level has the lowest.

To get these results, I produced 6 loose pages of mad scientist work. Figuring this all out has been challenging and fun.

The Equation in Action

Graph of Animal Crossing: New Horizon's CGP. Most points are above 50 CGP, past 30 hours, and are labeled as a comfort game.

This is a graph of CGP values from 50 different Animal Crossing: New Horizons players.

The CGP is stretched along the hours the player had put into Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The idea is that the more time a player puts into the game, the more familiar and predictable it becomes, which also affects stress levels, thus increasing the CGP. The graph has a subtle upward momentum. The yellow dots, which mean the player labeled it as a comfort game, tend to have higher CGP and more hours than the pink dots.

Vertified Comfort Game.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons has a high general CGP. Excluding the one outlier, the CGP range is 50-100. The game is low-stress, mostly predictable, and easy to familiarize with. On top of that, Animal Crossing: New Horizons's existence is heavily tied to the rise of COVID-19 and the shutdowns that happened around its launch, making the game susceptible to the widespread nostalgia felt for the pandemic (Rogers, 2022). Because of all of this, not only are the CGP scores high, but the game also has an exceptional level of players claiming it is or was a comfort game.

Something worth noting that skews this graph: I didn't recruit many "casual" Animal Crossing: New Horizons players in my survey. Perhaps you noticed the lack of players who have only played the game 30 hours or less. I picked Animal Crossing: New Horizons to test the equations because I knew where to look to find Animal Crossing fans. I don't think the lack of casuals tarnishes the results you see. It's more that we're missing the lower end of the full picture.

What's Next?

My next step is to offer inspiration to those who want to increase their own game's CGP by laying out different ways verified Comfort Games increased their own CGP. It’s about 80% done, but I want to continue my research into different studies and the games themselves to ensure I can back my words up.

To give a taste, nostalgia is a very interesting subject to tackle. The goal isn’t to trigger nostalgic memories and feelings of another time but to actually encourage the creation of nostalgic memories and feelings with the game. Based on Biskas's research, savoring the moment encourages the creation of nostalgic memories (2019), which then led me to research how to savor the moment.

For example, one way to savor the moment is to reflect on it (Mapp, 2023). In video games, that can take the form of reflections after a match or mission or ways to access the playtime's history.

Valorant gives very thorough post-match information while highlighting the player's performance. Valorant is so thorough that for any kill, the player can check the weapon they used, how far they were, and what weapon the enemy was holding when they dropped dead.

Within Banished there are graphs that depict the quantity of goods or citizens over time. It allows the player to pinpoint exactly when everything went right (or wrong).

Then there's video playback of the player's game, like the highlight reel in Mario Kart 8.

Mario Kart 8's highlight reel also acts as a vehicle for the player to capture and share their time with the game, which are other ways to savor the moment. I'll delve into those when I complete this case study. I hope you look forward to it.