#GameContent is a massive search category and I've been posting in it because I am, it turns out, a person who games. This surprised me when I first admitted it to myself because I had this dumb mental category of "gamers" that didn't include me. I thought you had to have been doing it since childhood on a dedicated setup with a whole community and a specific relationship with specific franchises. And then I realized that I've been playing games casually my whole adult life and using them specifically as a coping mechanism for the particular variety of mental noise that comes with being a creative person with an insomniac brain, and that's a legitimate relationship with games even if it didn't start with a Game Boy in 1997.
Let me explain the "studio wins" framing, because that's the real thing I want to talk about. When you make music, when you record and produce and edit and re-record and sit with something for hours trying to figure out why it's not working, the studio sometimes just beats you. You've been staring at a waveform for four hours and you've tried the thing seventeen different ways and it is still not the thing you want it to be, and you know that the answer is to leave it alone and come back tomorrow but your brain doesn't want to leave it alone. Your brain wants to SOLVE IT. Right now. Even though solving it right now is not available as an option. In those moments, I need something that will absorb my brain completely so that it can't keep chewing on the unsolvable problem. And games, specifically the right game for the right mood, are uniquely good at that.
Music is a bad shutdown mechanism for musicians. You can't listen to music to rest from music, not reliably. Most TV and movies I can partially watch while my brain is somewhere else, which means my brain stays somewhere else. Games demand active engagement. They require your attention in a way that overrides the background noise. That's the whole value proposition for me.
The Cozy Games Tier
My cozy games rotation is for when I'm exhausted but too wired to sleep, which describes approximately four nights out of seven. These are the games that ask just enough of your brain to keep it from looping but don't raise your cortisol or require you to process failure.
Stardew Valley remains on the list despite being several years old because it is almost perfect for this purpose. The rhythm of it, plant things, water things, talk to people, go to bed, wake up, do it again, is meditative in a way I genuinely didn't expect the first time I played it. There's something about the slow accumulation of progress, the way the farm changes over seasons, that feels like the exact opposite of the creative work where you stare at something for hours and it resists you. In Stardew, you do the thing and the thing happens and your farm gets better. The feedback loop is immediate and clear and KIND. I find this very restful.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons gets mocked as a pandemic-era relic but I will defend it. It asks nothing of you. There are no stakes. Your island gets a little more organized and beautiful if you show up and do things, and it stays exactly the same if you don't. The game respects your autonomy in a way that I find oddly moving. It doesn't punish absence. It doesn't escalate urgency. It's just there, with its soft music and its talking animals, and you can be there or not.
Recently I've been in a cozy building game phase, the kind where you construct and decorate spaces. I'm not going to name specific ones because the genre is huge and my preferences change, but the act of building small detailed environments with no combat and no time pressure is deeply satisfying in a way I can't fully explain except that it feels like the creative part of music production without the stakes.
The Rage Games Tier
This tier is for different energy. When I'm NOT tired but stuck, when I have frustration to burn and I need something to absorb it rather than trying to redirect it back into the work, I want something that is hard and fast and that lets me be aggressive without consequences. These are not cozy. These are cathartic.
I cycle through platform fighters and action games with good melee combat. The specific titles vary depending on what's new and what my friends are playing, but the category is consistent: I want something that requires skill, has a learning curve, and gives me a visible, concrete enemy to be actively hostile toward. There's a reason "Bite" became the most cathartic thing to perform live, the rage-release thing is real, and games can serve that function when I need it not to go back into the music.
I am competitive at these games in a way that is slightly out of proportion to the stakes. My friends who game with me have commented on this. I don't care. It's contained. It's useful. When you're in album rollout and you're watching streaming numbers and doing press and responding to things and staying in your feelings about fan reactions while also trying to be a functional person, having a place where you can be unabashedly competitive and frustrated and reactive is a pressure release valve. I recommend it.
The Games That Are Actually About Something
There's a third category that I want to name because it surprises people: the games that I play slowly and that I think about for a long time after. These aren't relaxation games. They're not catharsis games. They're the games that do what good books do, they give you a perspective or a narrative or an emotional experience that lands in you and stays.
I'm thinking specifically about story-driven games with good writing, games where the world-building is so specific and thoughtful that you start caring about characters the way you care about characters in fiction. I've played things in this category that genuinely changed how I thought about certain ideas, about choice and consequence, about identity, about what it means to be part of a community or to leave one. Some of that fed back into the music. Not directly, not consciously, but the way reading good fiction feeds into how you write.
I bring this up because there's a weird cultural dismissal of games as a serious medium and I think it's wrong. The interactive element, the fact that YOU are the agent in the story, that YOUR choices shape the narrative, produces a kind of engagement with themes and ideas that passive consumption can't replicate. I've had more interesting conversations about moral philosophy through game narratives than through most other contexts. Games can do the thing. Some of them are doing it extremely well. I want to give them their due.
Gaming During the Rollout
Right now, with HEATHEN HYMNS out and the rollout ongoing, my gaming schedule is completely irregular. Some weeks I get almost none in because press and promo absorb everything. Other weeks I have a block of time in the evening with no obligations and I disappear into something for four hours and emerge feeling more human.
What I've noticed is that gaming during the rollout period serves a specific purpose beyond general decompression: it gives me a context where the music doesn't exist. Where I'm not Vixen Rae with an album out, not watching how songs are landing, not reading reviews. I'm just a person trying to figure out a level. The identity simplification is restful. Being only one thing, a person playing a game, for a few hours, when the rest of the time you're many things simultaneously, is a genuine relief.
I've talked about this on TikTok and gotten comments from other musicians and creators who've said the same thing. The performance of self that comes with being a public figure, even a small-scale public figure (which is what I am, I know my scale), requires a lot of energy. Gaming is one of the few things where that performance is completely unnecessary. Nobody is watching. Nobody is waiting for me to be good at it in a way that reflects on my brand. I can be mediocre at a hard section of a game for an hour and it costs me nothing except time. that's freedom, actually. That's real freedom.
So: that's my gaming life. Cozy when tired, rage when frustrated, thoughtful when I need a brain-reset. If you're a fellow night owl musician or creative person who uses games as a brain-shutdown mechanism, I see you and I think we're doing something smart. I love you. Go touch grass or don't, I'm not your mom.
Oh and drop your current rotation in the comments on my last TikTok if you want. I'm always looking for the next thing to disappear into when the mixes are done and my ears are tired. Biscuit will judge your choices and so will I, lovingly.