Theme Park Audiovisual Aesthetics in Cozy Games and Acoustic Territory-Making for Micro-Scaled Cozy Worlds
Location
Moore Auditorium
Start Date
20-6-2026 4:30 PM
Description
Cozy video games such as Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Nintendo 2020) and Stardew Valley (ConcernedApe 2016) draw extensively from theme park design principles to craft experiences grounded in comfort, predictability, and sensory pleasure. Like theme parks, these games rely on spatial legibility, choreographed movement, controlled temporality, and carefully curated aesthetics. Their audiovisual landscapes featuring soft color palettes, miniaturized architecture, forced perspective, and clearly defined pathways echo the designed micro-worlds of parks, while looping tasks and repeatable activities mirror ride cycles and daily routines that encourage rhythmic engagement. Although often described through tropes of cuteness, pastoralism, or nostalgia, cozy games also operate as immersive, emotionally legible environments structured through multimodal theming, especially sound. Theme parks are not only visual spectacles but carefully managed acoustic spaces, and cozy games similarly construct refuge through sonic consistency and repetition. Animal Crossing: New Horizons organizes its island through zoning, NPC schedules, and hourly musical cues, while Stardew Valley uses Pelican Town as a pastoral hub shaped by seasonal retheming, environmental sounds, and routine-driven social life. In this presentation, I examine cozy games through the lens of theme park aesthetics alongside soundwalking and sound mapping to show how their sonic architectures cultivate familiarity, attentiveness, and comfort. Footsteps on grass, rain on rooftops, cicadas in summer, and recurring musical motifs function as affective cartographies of place. By linking game design to theme park logic, these titles produce worlds that feel both manageable and enchanted—where labor is aestheticized, sociality is curated, and time unfolds with reassuring regularity.
Recommended Citation
Galloway, Kate, "Theme Park Audiovisual Aesthetics in Cozy Games and Acoustic Territory-Making for Micro-Scaled Cozy Worlds" (2026). Theme Park Music and Sound. 7.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/tpms/2026/saturday/7
Theme Park Audiovisual Aesthetics in Cozy Games and Acoustic Territory-Making for Micro-Scaled Cozy Worlds
Moore Auditorium
Cozy video games such as Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Nintendo 2020) and Stardew Valley (ConcernedApe 2016) draw extensively from theme park design principles to craft experiences grounded in comfort, predictability, and sensory pleasure. Like theme parks, these games rely on spatial legibility, choreographed movement, controlled temporality, and carefully curated aesthetics. Their audiovisual landscapes featuring soft color palettes, miniaturized architecture, forced perspective, and clearly defined pathways echo the designed micro-worlds of parks, while looping tasks and repeatable activities mirror ride cycles and daily routines that encourage rhythmic engagement. Although often described through tropes of cuteness, pastoralism, or nostalgia, cozy games also operate as immersive, emotionally legible environments structured through multimodal theming, especially sound. Theme parks are not only visual spectacles but carefully managed acoustic spaces, and cozy games similarly construct refuge through sonic consistency and repetition. Animal Crossing: New Horizons organizes its island through zoning, NPC schedules, and hourly musical cues, while Stardew Valley uses Pelican Town as a pastoral hub shaped by seasonal retheming, environmental sounds, and routine-driven social life. In this presentation, I examine cozy games through the lens of theme park aesthetics alongside soundwalking and sound mapping to show how their sonic architectures cultivate familiarity, attentiveness, and comfort. Footsteps on grass, rain on rooftops, cicadas in summer, and recurring musical motifs function as affective cartographies of place. By linking game design to theme park logic, these titles produce worlds that feel both manageable and enchanted—where labor is aestheticized, sociality is curated, and time unfolds with reassuring regularity.