The Unspoken Rules of Playing Together, Apart

The Unspoken Rules of Playing Together, Apart

The neon-green watering can glitched for a second, then reappeared in my hand. My character, a tiny approximation of me with comically large eyes, stood motionless on a patch of digital grass that was just a little too perfect. A friend’s island. I’d been here for what felt like 13 minutes, and we hadn’t said a word. She was on the other side of the island, meticulously arranging hybrid pansies. I was just… here. Walking. Looking at her digital stuff. A strange, sharp pang, like the first shock of ice cream hitting the roof of your mouth, shot through my brain. What are we even doing?

“Ambiguity is the refuge of the unprepared mind.”

– Nora B.-L., my old debate coach

It’s a question that haunted me for years about these games. My old debate coach, Nora B.-L., a woman who believed every conversation was a game of inches toward a logical pin, would have called this a colossal waste of time. For her, every system had a winner. Every interaction was a negotiation. You stated your premise, you defended it, you dismantled your opponent’s. The goal was to win, clearly and decisively. She used to say, “Ambiguity is the refuge of the unprepared mind.” If she saw me standing on a pixelated beach, emoting a little sparkle animation at a friend’s flowerbed, she would have given me a withering look and assigned me 233 pages of rhetorical theory as penance.

For a long time, I agreed with her. I saw multiplayer games through her lens: a series of objectives, leaderboards, and victory screens. The social contract was clear. You either worked together to defeat a common, powerful enemy, or you competed against each other to prove your skill. The language was one of conflict and dominance: K/D ratios, DPS charts, capture points, endgame raids. It was about performance. You showed up to play, and to play well. Your value to the group was measured in your output, your efficiency, your contribution to the win.

I used to argue, quite passionately, that so-called “cozy multiplayer” was a dilution of this contract. It was antisocial, a pantomime of connection without the substance. You’re just two people tending separate digital gardens in proximity. It’s parallel play, something toddlers do before they learn how to actually interact. I said this to a friend once, and I meant it. I believed it. It was an argument Nora would have been proud of: crisp, critical, and utterly dismissive.

I was wrong.

A slow, quiet erosion of certainty.

My conversion wasn’t a sudden epiphany. It was a slow, quiet erosion of my own certainty, happening over dozens of nights in Stardew Valley. A friend and I had a shared farm. On paper, the goal is to make money, to become an efficient agricultural machine. We could have min-maxed it. We could have assigned tasks, created spreadsheets, and optimized our crop layouts for maximum yield. We did none of that. One night, he spent three hours building elaborate, unnecessary fences around a pumpkin patch while I spent the same amount of time trying to catch a specific fish in the rain. We were making catastrophically slow progress. Our farm was a chaotic mess with an income of about $373 a week. And it was one of the most genuinely connected experiences I’ve had online.

We were existing in a shared space without demanding anything from one another. The social contract wasn’t about performance; it was about presence. The unspoken rules were entirely different.

The Social Contract of Presence

There is no win condition, only a shared condition.

The point is to simply be there, together.

This is the first and most important rule. The point is not to finish the community center or to get a perfect farm rating. The point is to simply be there, together, while you both potter around. It’s a form of ambient companionship. The activity is just an excuse for the presence. It’s the digital equivalent of sitting in the same room on your laptops, occasionally sharing a meme. The silence isn’t empty; it’s comfortable. It’s the profound difference between “What are we doing?” and “What do we have to do?” The answer to the latter is, blessedly, nothing.

This new etiquette is subtle and surprisingly complex. You don’t show up at a friend’s Animal Crossing island and immediately start critiquing their layout. You don’t harvest their most valuable crops in Stardew Valley without asking. You don’t rush ahead in a quest in Palia, leaving them behind. To do so would be to misunderstand the assignment completely. You are not there to be a more efficient player; you are there to be a better friend. This flips the entire logic of online gaming on its head. The pressure to perform evaporates. What’s left is a space for mutual support and shared aesthetics.

Tools Shape the Contract

Nora B.-L. had this fixation with fountain pens. She owned 43 of them, each with a different nib, a different ink, a different weight. She insisted that the tool you use to write an argument shapes the argument itself. A fine, needle-point nib encourages precise, clinical language, while a broad, wet nib invites sweeping, expressive strokes.

– Nora B.-L.

It was a bit of a tangent she’d go on, but I see the wisdom in it now. The tools of a game define its social contract. When a game’s primary verbs are ‘shoot,’ ‘conquer,’ and ‘destroy,’ the interactions will be competitive and aggressive. When the primary verbs are ‘plant,’ ‘gather,’ ‘build,’ and ‘give,’ the interactions become collaborative and nurturing.

Watering Can

VS

Weapon

A watering can is not a weapon. A fishing rod is not a tool of domination. They are instruments of patience. They invite a slower, more deliberate form of engagement with the world and, by extension, with the people you share it with. This simple shift in mechanics is responsible for creating an entirely new category of online social space. The breadth of these experiences is staggering now, moving far beyond simple farming simulators. You can find yourself running a magical potion shop, decorating a shared house, or exploring a peaceful wilderness together. The variety in the best cozy games on Steam demonstrates a clear and growing demand for digital interactions not predicated on conflict. It’s a quiet revolution fought with shovels and paintbrushes.

The Vulnerability of Presence

I think I was so resistant to it because it felt vulnerable. In a competitive game, your skill is your armor. You can hide behind your rank, your gear, your ability to click on heads. You are a quantifiable asset. In a cozy game, there’s nothing to hide behind. You just bring yourself. Your taste in decorating, your weird way of organizing chests, your desire to spend an entire day fishing. It’s a lower-stakes, but somehow more personal, form of interaction. It mirrors the quiet, unassuming evolution of real-world adult friendships, which often thrive not on grand adventures but on the simple, repeated comfort of shared presence.

I even find myself adopting its etiquette. When a friend messages me, stressed from work, I don’t suggest a few rounds of a high-octane shooter to blow off steam anymore. Instead, I say, “Want to come fish on my island for a bit?” The invitation isn’t to *do* something, but to *undo* something. To unwind. To de-escalate. To exist in a space where the only expectation is that you show up.

A digital third place where you are valued not for what you can achieve, but simply because you are there.

Show up, and be kind.

We are social creatures, but we’re also exhausted. Exhausted by the constant pressure to perform, to optimize, to compete-not just in games, but everywhere. We’re graded, ranked, and reviewed in our careers, our social media, our side hustles. What these cozy multiplayer games offer is a radical proposition: a digital third place where you are valued not for what you can achieve, but simply because you are there. A place where the social contract has only one clause, written in invisible ink: show up, and be kind. My younger self would have scoffed at the simplicity. Nora B.-L. would have found it illogical. But after a long day, there are few things more logical than dropping a perfectly ripe, pixelated peach on your friend’s doorstep, saying nothing, and knowing they understand completely.

Embrace the comfort of presence.