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Writing an article “against wholesomeness,” and above all “against wholesomeness in video gaming,” can condemn a person for one of the gravest sins in neoliberal societies: being a killjoy. As explained by Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, contemporary society looks like the future described in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: people give up their rights and their freedom and exchange them for entertainment and amusement. Nowadays, spoiling the fun is almost a crime. But analyzing wholesome video games gives us the opportunity to discuss the interweaving of two distinct phenomena linked with technology and digital platforms: “internet wholesomeness,” and its conservatism, and video games and their relationship with capitalist structures and systems, even when they are included in a “wholesome” narrative and depicted through “wholesome” visuals.

So, let’s start spoiling the fun from the beginning, that is when “wholesome memes” popularized the internet concept of “wholesomeness” sometime around 2016. Google Trends shows that the popularity of wholesome-related searches has more than tripled since the beginning of that year, and in 2017 wholesome memes were one of the trends listed by Tumblr’s Year in Review.

Wholesome memes are a reaction against the toxicity we usually find in online humor, they recontextualize memes depriving them of their edginess and using our meme literacy in order to convey messages that are interpreted as “positive.” New York Magazine’s Intelligencer describes them as a third step in the evolution of the memescape: we have “relatable memes,” usually ready-made images with text (“image macros”) used to express a specific mood, then we have “ironic memes,” that comment on memes themselves and ridicule both their format and their audience, and finally we have “wholesome memes,” that accept our shared knowledge of memes and their jokes and use it in order to express feelings of love and friendship we wouldn’t expect from a certain format. From this point of view, wholesome memes are not just another category of the memescape, but its truest form: “wholesome memes are the first type to admit that it’s not embarrassing to communicate through memes” Brian Feldman writes on the Intelligencer. They therefore work differently from “anti-memes,” where images are captioned with anti-jokes referencing the texts we usually find coupled with those images. Anti-memes “intend to destroy [the] power, establishment, public recognition, and longevity that a meme template enjoys by rendering it incapable of accommodating any more humor through pictorial or textual input within its frame” (from To Meme or Not to Meme: The Contribution of Anti-Memes to Humour in the Digital Space by Kanika Kumar and Vishal Varier), while wholesome memes want to exploit that popularity and that power.

This means that wholesome memes are still deeply linked with social platforms, their algorithms and their economy. We can appreciate how wholesome memes made positivity viral in online environments, but they still depend on the viral business models that have shaped online platforms and meme culture.

Wholesome memes are also distinctly “apolitical”: while memes often engage with real-world events and politics, and even a relatable meme about “thank God it’s Friday” sees its audience as composed by workers stuck inside the gears of the capitalist workweek, wholesome memes focus on feelings and emotions, on the happiness we can find in family, friends and love. I don’t think that their growth in and after 2016, the year of the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, is a coincidence. On Vox, Aja Romano defined this wholesome content as “‘Hang in there!’ kitten posters for the digital age.”

The “apoliticism” of wholesome memes (like every “apoliticism”) and the pursuit of happiness and of concepts and institutions popularly connected with happiness (like the marriage) reinforces the status quo and convey conservative and traditional values supported by hegemonic capitalist cultures. “Happiness is used to redescribe social norms as social goods. We might even say that [black, queer and feminist] political movements have struggled against rather than for happiness” Sara Ahmed writes in The Promise of Happiness. We can find “Hang in there!” cat posters inside offices and workplaces: hang in there, accept your shitty job, accept your shitty management, work hard and one day you’ll buy the car you’ve seen in that advertisement, you’ll buy that house you want in the residential outskirts of a city that every night expels you from its center (that’s why you need that car) in order to take care of tourists. This kind of “Hang in there!” optimism is so anti-radical that it’s even explicitly promoted by capitalist corporate systems. For example, journalist and author Barbara Ehrenreich talked about the social control of the “mandatory optimism and cheerfulness” found in many aspects of US life, where people are encouraged to always have a “positive attitude” in order to be successful as they could actually and individually “change the physical world with [their] thoughts.”

The “wholesome (video) games” label has developed from this “internet wholesomeness.” As wholesome memes can be seen as a reaction against the usual dark humor we find online, wholesome games can be seen as an answer to the traditional AAA video game industry, the misery porn of gritty and “mature” video games like Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part 2 and the heritage of a post-Nintendo marketing mostly targeted at cishet teenage boys from privileged racial backgrounds. We can identify a bunch of common and shared characteristics of wholesome games: lack either of violent mechanics or of at least extreme violence, slower pacing, bright and pastel-like colors, simple visuals often recalling childhood, simple game mechanics and inclusive casts with diverse characters. These games don’t usually match publishers’ portfolios and, thanks to their low barrier of entry and their contents, can reach audiences that have been overlooked by the premium video game industry.

The label has been promoted by the curatorial practice of the Wholesome Games Twitter account, started by indie game developer Matthew Taylor (Rolling Hills: Make Sushi, Make Friends) in February 2019. The founders of the Wholesome Games Twitter account defined wholesome games as games with “lower stakes, less violence, less stressful situations, positive themes, good representation of marginalized groups and friendly, welcoming aesthetics,” mostly confirming the list of features I pinpointed earlier. We could even say the Wholesome Games Twitter account actually invented and defined the label as we know it today and made this label commercially viable through its own virality and its annual streaming event, the Wholesome Direct, one of the few volunteer-run (sales from merchandise go to charities and funds) and non-corporate online showcases actually centered on independent (and often marginalized) developers and smaller publishers. In 2021 the Wholesome Direct was part of the Guerrilla Collective event and featured 75 works, squeezed into a one-hour long stream that brought attention to at least some of the games that were included: developers report hundreds of new followers on Twitter and YouTube and thousands of new wishlists on Steam.

The founders of the Wholesome Games Twitter account are also wary of the burden of the heritage of “internet wholesomeness” and of the necessary nuances. “If a game is violent, but that violence is about overthrowing an oppressor, is it unwholesome? We say no!” they write in the FAQ session of their website, adding that “toxic positivity is a real problem, and lots of words and ideas like ‘wholesome’ (or ‘family values’) have been warped into dog whistles and harmful purity tests, or used to dismiss serious concerns.” Furthermore, unlike wholesome memes, wholesome games often have political and explicitly anticapitalist messages and a certain touch of melancholy, and even their smaller scale can be seen as the attempt to escape from games’ capitalistic need “to be measured in play time,” as explained by Federico Fasce in his essay about lightness in video games. But after acknowledging the political aspect of making art and running a business like a video game studio, the founders of the Wholesome Games Twitter account write in their FAQs that “sometimes it’s radical to make hopeful art in times of adversity.”  And here we can see how a certain misinterpretation is born: since wholesome games have those anticapitalist undertones and they are proposed as an alternative to the big premium video game industry, people risk to think of them as “subversive,” “disruptive,” “radical.”  I fear that we are misunderstanding how a radical game looks like, because we are not seeing radical experiences in the wholesome games scene and, on the contrary, this trend shows how deeply video games have been influenced by capitalist and antiradical concepts.

Wholesome games still tend to avoid conflicts and negative feelings of unhappiness, discomfort and uneasiness, with the resulting predisposition for conformity that we’ve already seen while we were talking about wholesome memes. Even their fixation with video game violence (and with the lack of it) can be seen as something learnt from 90s’ conservative moral panic about violent video games like Mortal Kombat, Night Trap and Doom. The conformity of wholesome games is also mirrored in their visual homogeneity: PC Gamer, while praising the efforts of the Wholesome Games Twitter account, described the Wholesome Games Direct as an indistinguishable “pastel-iced cake.”

But it’s above all in their mechanics that we can see the limits of this assumed radicality of wholesome games. Video games are based on computational systems, on calculating binary machines, they are “a set of rules, [because] computers are extraordinarily good at following rules as long as they are given clear yes/no conditions” (Steven Conway in How to Play Video Games, edited by Matthew Thomas Payne and Nina Huntemann). And in order to play video games, we too must become “extraordinarily good at following rules.” In many games we must complete a to-do list of (often repetitive) tasks, usually designed to be accomplished in a specific way. If we follow the orders, we are awarded with a bit of narrative, a score that quantifies our “skill” (that is, our competence in respecting the rules of the system) or just another list of usually harder tasks. Video gaming is work, and video games are fantasy capitalist and meritocratic systems where our accomplishments are actually acknowledged and where our failures are only temporary, even when punished with a “game over.” Playing massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), with the organizational activities needed by their “guilds” of players and the necessary “farming” (performing repetitive actions in order to acquire various digital goods), has long been compared to having a second job. “Users spend on average 20 hours a week in online games, and many of them describe their game play as obligation, tedium, and more like a second job than entertainment” Nick Yee writes in The Labor of Fun: How Video Games Blur the Boundaries of Work and Play. “Using well-known behavior conditioning principles, video games are inherently work platforms that train us to become better gameworkers. And the work that is being performed in video games is increasingly similar to the work performed in business corporations.”

While making us better “gameworkers,” video games make us better workers, too: they occupy our free time with activities designed both to prepare us for the next working day and to continuously instil capitalist work ethics into us. Mobile games like Candy Crush, Angry Birds, hyper-casual games, idle games and our daily scrolling of news and Twitter feeds serve a specific purpose inside capitalist societies: they make us feel distracted, “implying that there is, outside our distraction, a coherent reality which we can and should tap back into as and when we please or feel obliged. […] We don’t truly desire to play Candy Crush but unfortunately have to work, but rather […] we feel the need for distraction only when we are working, to re-enforce the sense (increasingly lost) that our work has coherent order and value compared to these activities” (from Alfie Brown’s Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism). In-game activities, such as farming in-game currency (an activity known as “gold farming”), can even be monetized in the physical world (for example, selling these in-game currencies for real money) and can become paid jobs. Meanwhile, successful games like Giants Software’s Farming Simulator series explicitly simulate real-world jobs and some video games work as platforms that exploit the free labour of their users (Julian Kücklich calls it “playbour”), who realizes almost all the contents. Examples are Nintendo’s Super Mario Maker series and Popcannibal’s wholesome video game Kind Words (lo fi chill beats to write to), where players exchange kind letters with each other, venting their real-world frustrations and concerns. A digital distribution platform for personalized “Hang in there!” posters.

Wholesome games have also been presented as safe spaces for members of marginalized communities, and a certain importance lies in conceiving video games as interactive speculative fictions and spaces for personal and communal experimentation where traditional hurtful video game narratives can be subverted. But the risk is making wholesome games just another escapist fantasy where we can find the kindness and the empowerment we can’t find in the real world and where progress and clear feedback are computationally guaranteed.

Moreover, we’ve already seen the limits of the liberating power of cybernetics. When Richard Bartle contributed to the first multiplayer online role-playing game (MUD) in the early 80s, he wanted to model a true meritocratic society, showing us how a world where everyone actually starts with the same opportunities could work in order to inspire a change in the real world. “We wanted the things that were in MUD to be reflected in the real world,” Bartle told Eurogamer. “We were creating a true meritocracy. Not because I thought a meritocracy was the one true way, but that if we were going to have a system in which people ranked themselves, then a meritocracy was the least-worst approach.” But this almost-utopian society was walled: it was accessible only to people with a computer (something that was only available in universities and research facilities at the beginning), an internet (or pre-internet) connection and a certain proficiency in the English language. And, being built on the legacy of pen-and-paper dungeon-crawler role-play games like Dungeons & Dragons, experiences that were in turn built on wargaming, it wasn’t able to either avoid or challenge the heritage of mechanics designed to represent the imperialist and capitalist ideology that led to the rise of wargaming, first in the 19th century with the Kriegsspiel wargames developed by the Prussian army and then, also in digital form, during the Cold War. In role-play games human beings are depicted with numbers (experiences points, health points, statistics…) that are clearly shown to players in order to allow them to optimize the human machine and to make them foresee its calculated destiny, and video games push even further this computational approach. “Videogames [sic] are built upon technologies of control and quantification, and they are still by and large informed by them” writes Paolo Pedercini. “When we produce artful depictions of our world using computers, we inevitably carry over a cybernetic bias that could reinforce certain assumptions and mindsets. From the eyes of a computing machine, everything is mathematically defined and susceptible to rational calculation.” From these bases, games like MUD quickly evolved into the hyper-capitalist spaces of contemporary MMORPGs. These are games where our strength and our intelligence are numbers, and we are eager to accept this depiction because that’s how capitalist society represents us, from sport records to school grades.

By representing our world through rules and capitalist structures and by emulating the opaque simulations and models on which we base our policies and our everyday life, games teach us to see it through these lenses, and wholesome games are not different. In Spry Fox’s Cozy Grove (one of the games promoted by the Wholesome Games Twitter account) we are a young scout who must help a community of ghostly bears on an island. It’s one of many games focused on becoming part of a community: players either are introduced into an existing society or can build/rebuild a new one, bonding with its inhabitants. But we don’t learn much about building real communities by playing Cozy Grove and other similar “life sims”: traditional non-player characters ask us to complete a series of quests in order to earn their favor until we become “best friends” and maybe gain some rewards, we harvest resources from the environment in order to craft new items and there’s a character progression strongly linked with the amount of virtual money we own. Even in Cozy Grove’s cozy island, inhabited by dead and tender bears, we must hoard as much money as we can and buy increasingly expensive items, even in these fantasy spaces our fantasy is limited to capitalism.

That’s because we believe “that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (from Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?). After the fall of the Soviet Union, capitalism has been considered and culturally represented and promoted as the only natural way of managing economies. When these games include anticapitalist messages and contents, this “gestural anticapitalism,” as Fisher calls it, actually reinforces capitalism itself, both satisfying our frustrations by making us perform anticapitalism (or by making us watch it being performed, in movies) within fictional settings and showing us that capitalism, being “natural,” doesn’t need propaganda. That’s why we have fictions like Obsidian Entertainment (now owned by Microsoft) and Take Two’s The Outer Worlds, a game that has been repeatedly described as “anticapitalist” even though it’s actually directed by a person who claims to be “not against capitalism” and even though it features many traditional RPG work-like mechanics and no revolutionary perspectives. Capitalism may suck, but “there’s no alternative” and we must accept its systems, even in their ludic forms.

More recently, video game wholesomeness has become a specific marketing label that has sprung out of the control of the Wholesome Games Twitter account (that has never wanted to own the concept). For example, “wholesome” has been officially used to describe Sega’s Two Point Campus management sims during the Nintendo Direct showcase at E3 2021. When works aren’t built on a solid anticapitalist basis they are easily (almost inevitably) co-opted by mainstream capitalist cultures, but probably what we are seeing with the “wholesome” label shouldn’t even be seen as a process of “recuperation,” an appropriation of something radical and subversive by bourgeois society: capitalism doesn’t actually need to co-opt wholesome games, because they are already part of its culture. The Wholesome Games Twitter account, for example, has heavily promoted Animal Crossing: New Horizons, a game developed and published by a multinational corporation (Nintendo) that has influenced many wholesome games and that we could view as “the original wholesome company,” one of the main inspirations behind the whole trend, the Wholesome Games Twitter account and its Nintendo-like Direct.

Maybe the point is that basically every video game tries to bring out the positive feelings we usually associate with “wholesomeness.” One of the most popularly referenced concepts in game design is Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s flow, the state of mind we have when engaged with increasingly difficult tasks that continuously meet our increasing competence. Difficulty in video games is managed in order to make players reach this “flow,” that Csíkszentmihályi explicitly links to happiness: “in the long run optimal experiences add up to a sense of mastery—or perhaps better, a sense of participation in determining the content of life—that comes as close to what is usually meant by happiness as anything else we can conceivably imagine” (from Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, that starts with a chapter titled “Happiness Revisited”). So, every video game (at least, every video game that wants to make us reach the “flow”) is actually a “feel-good machine” designed to elicit positive emotions. That’s usually true even for the grimmest survival horror game: we start Resident Evil games with a knife (or a similarly weak weapon), but that’s only a way to make us feel even more empowered, to make us feel even better, when we end them with a rocket launcher. That’s why many games realized by marginalized developers are still largely overlooked by capitalist markets and, sometimes, by distribution platforms: they are not “wholesome” at all, they reject this illusory sense of fulfillment, they deal with topics that are still considered taboo and they deal with them in ways that are still considered taboo.

We shouldn’t even ignore the business models employed by wholesome games, the devices running them and the platforms distributing them. A couple of examples can clarify how seeing these games in their technological and economic context helps us understand how they embrace capitalist practices they sometimes pretend to oppose. ustwo’s Assemble with Care (promoted by the Wholesome Games Twitter account) is a “wholesome” puzzle game about repairing old objects and celebrating their value. But the game is just a fantasy, it doesn’t actually teach us how to repair our items, and it was originally released as an exclusive for the iOS devices produced by Apple, a company that strongly opposes our “Right to Repair” and modify our electronic devices in order to guarantee their obsolescence. thatgamecompany’s Sky: Children of Light (another game promoted by the Wholesome Games Twitter account) is basically a game-as-a-service, microtransaction-powered Journey, where we fly and slide through meadows, forests and deserts making new friends and interacting with them thanks to a plethora of digital currencies that can partly be bought with real money. While other video games try to make us spend on customization options for our weapons, Sky: Children of Light turns friendship and love into a monetized service. And since wholesome games still rely on digital distribution platforms and their algorithms, they are just part of the current digital transition from a capitalism that controls the means of production to a platform capitalism that controls the means of distributions. An apparent “democratisation” through digital platforms that we’ve seen in the video game scene at least since the so-called “indie revolution” and that represents the core of the web 2.0 and its “creator economy.”

This is why I find it difficult to think of wholesome gaming as something even potentially “radical”: it’s a market label born from a conservative concept of wholesomeness and mostly willing to accept the mechanics and the production, distribution and marketing models of the traditional video game industry. I do not write that as some kind of accusation against people who love playing wholesome games (as I wouldn’t write an accusation against people who love playing… Destiny), against the studios developing them and trying to give us some comfort with and within the limited tools and structures of the contemporary game market or against the Wholesome Games Twitter account. In fact, I want to stress the importance of this kind of initiative, that shows how independent studios and smaller companies can join forces and create new promotional and commercial opportunities, carving out a niche outside traditional publishers. At the same time, bigger and smaller companies like Sony Interactive Entertainment, Microsoft and Devolver Digital still publish the usual violent, edgy and hardcore video gaming experiences we know, so we must not fear that wholesome games are going to take over the whole game industry. A lot of the backlash against this trend can be ascribed to the same reasons as that against casual and mobile games: they are not “for gamers,” they are “too feminine” and a bunch of spoiled boys fear for the future of “their” hobby because someone else is playing with “their” toys. But we shouldn’t forget that the free-to-play and mobile industry is the real video game industry, now contributing more than half of global video game revenues with products that go from microtransaction-powered clicker games to competitive experiences like League of Legends. Wholesome games are part of an on-going expansion of the video game market. Interestingly, this expansion was somehow pioneered by Nintendo with its DS and Wii consoles before the 2007-2009 recession that brought to the rise of both the indie and the mobile game industry. Even in this aspect, the wholesome trend is somehow picking up the baton from Nintendo.

Instead, making radical games would mean and means changing the way games are produced and distributed (starting from the working conditions of people developing them), changing the way hardware is designed, produced and distributed, tackling the limits of the accounting machines we are hijacking and the heritage of a history of informatics mostly evolved from the needs of the US military complex. It means overthrowing the top-down structures of culture production. It means accepting that games are software, breaking their illusion and critically thinking about how they model real-world phenomena. Postman claims that “only through a deep and unfailing awareness of the structure and effects of information, through a demystification of media, is there any hope of our gaining some measure of control over television, or the computer, or any other medium” and radical games help us gain control over the medium, they help us understand digital platforms and help us remodel them and the whole internet. They are either subversive actions themselves or preparation (maybe, propaganda) for future subversive actions, they are part of a revolutionary change and they call for a revolutionary change. Like contemporary left-wing politics, wholesome games don’t seek structural change: they just hope to temper the worst effects of neoliberalism. They say that capitalist systems and mechanics may be unavoidable, even in video games, but that at least we can have a non-violent, kind and more inclusive version of them. They are not radical: they are reformist at most.