Technologies

How Video Games Help Me Endure the Winter Blues

Commentary: Exposure to nature and sunshine when I play cozy games boosts my mood during the long Scottish winter.

Who among us is willing to leave the house in the dead of winter? If you can, I applaud you. But for many of us who live closer to the Arctic Circle than the Tropic of Cancer, late fall to early spring is designated the «indoor part of the year.»

Not only is it dark and cold, but it often makes us miserable too. I live in Edinburgh and I adore this spooky, gothic city, but winters in Scotland are not for the faint-hearted.

In late December, there are less than seven hours of sunlight a day, and even then it’s often so dreary that I eat my lunch by lamplight. As winter plods on into the murky months of January and February, I sense the cold creeping into my bones and setting up shop. It takes all my energy to resist the fatigue and listlessness that I can feel cajoling me into powering down my body and mind, persuading me I can afford to operate on standby mode until April.

The older I get, the more sensitive I seem to become to every seasonal fluctuation in my environment. I do all that’s within my power to combat this — I exercise, take the strongest vitamin D supplements I can get my hands on, fine-tune my diet and turn my face toward the sun at every opportunity. It’s enough to keep me functioning, if not exactly thriving.

But this year, I have a new weapon at my disposal: an awareness that the aesthetic experience of playing cozy games really helps take the edge off my winter blues. This increasingly popular gaming subgenre for the most part combines cute characters with open-world, aesthetically pleasing environments and various gathering, growing, nurturing, exploration or creative tasks to create a utopian gaming experience that’s perfect for pacifists.

Like millions of others locked down during the pandemic, I first discovered the comfort of cozy games in 2020. I sank all my nonworking hours into playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons on Nintendo Switch.

I’m not alone in finding serenity in the placid, peril-free worlds of cozy games, but it took me more time than you might expect to realize that I was using them as what the internet (and probably a therapist) might dub as a coping mechanism. During lockdown they were a convenient substitute for socializing and being outside. Now, when lockdown is over but SAD season is upon us, it replaces daylight and… being outside.

I only understood the full extent of the impact of cozy games on my mental wellbeing after sinking several months at the tail end of 2022 into Disney’s Dreamlight Valley, a life sim that — in spite of the endless fetch quests, frequent bugs, lack of updates and uncanny similarities to Animal Crossing — I persist in playing.

My misgivings about the game and how I’m choosing to spend my precious hours left on this Earth aside, time spent in sunny, jolly Dreamlight Valley genuinely buoys my mood. And I’m not even a «Disney adult.» I have noticed, though, that whenever the weather in the game shifts and the sky darkens, I immediately become indignant and morose.

«Why is it raining?» I complained to my husband on more than one occasion. «I play this game to escape the rain, not to endure more of it.»

As the Christmas break approached, I felt an overwhelming desire to spend my time off replaying the game Lake, which I first played last summer on Xbox Game Pass. I’m familiar with the seasonal tug toward specific cultural phenomena, primarily from my annual fall rewatch of Gilmore Girls, but this one was new for me.

In Lake, you play as a young woman who returns from her big city corporate job to her small hometown in the Pacific Northwest for a couple of weeks to cover her father’s mail delivery job while her parents take a trip. Every day, you wake up, collect your mail from the post office and drive around the lake where the town is situated making sure people get their letters and parcels.

At the end of the two weeks, as you’ve begun to connect (or in some cases reconnect) with the townsfolk, you have to decide between staying on in your dad’s job and returning to the rat race, effectively giving you the option to join the Great Resignation in game form. A romantic subplot may also sway your decision, as well as giving it the feel of a Netflix Christmas rom-com.

This most gentle of gaming experiences isn’t for everyone, but the way the game forced me to slow down and spend time pootling through the forest in my van, watching the changing light over the eponymous lake, felt deeply meditative. In fact, it mirrored the feelings of contentment and tranquility I get when I head out into the forests and glens of Scotland almost every single weekend.

As the winter draws in, these expeditions into the wilderness tend to fall by the wayside in favor of staying inside under a blanket. But the pull of the emotions I experience by standing quietly underneath a big sky doesn’t just vanish. In this regard, it makes perfect sense to me that while I was curled up on my sofa feeling melancholy about the weather, the thing I wanted to do most of all was to tumble back into the world of Lake.

But as it had since left Game Pass, I felt compelled to resort to other options. I plumped for A Short Hike, a charming open-world exploration game on Nintendo Switch where you play as a little bird who hikes up a mountain before soaring back down on the wind. I played it through one early January weekend, soaking up the sweetness of the story and joy of exploring the landscape, before feeling it carry me through the following week.

Since then, I’ve become immersed in the world of Stardew Valley. Even though I was rather put out to find myself equipped with a sword for swatting bugs — not exactly in the spirit of cozy games — I’ve been swept up in watching the seasons change throughout my bucolic farming life.

I know as the seasons change for real and I emerge from the fog of winter, these games will probably fall by the wayside in favor of genuine outdoor pursuits. But I’m also comforted by the knowledge they’ll be waiting for me the next time the clocks go back in October. When the world seems depressing and grim, they’ll be there to provide me with a little solace, making those dark, cold months feel a little less scary and a little more bearable.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Connections Hints, Answers and Help for March 18, #1011

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for March 18 #1011.

Looking for the most recent Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles.

Today’s NYT Connections puzzle is pretty tricky, but musicians might find the blue group easy. Read on for clues and today’s Connections answers.

The Times has a Connections Bot, like the one for Wordle. Go there after you play to receive a numeric score and to have the program analyze your answers. Players who are registered with the Times Games section can now nerd out by following their progress, including the number of puzzles completed, win rate, number of times they nabbed a perfect score and their win streak.

Read more: Hints, Tips and Strategies to Help You Win at NYT Connections Every Time

Hints for today’s Connections groups

Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.

Yellow group hint: Time between two things, maybe.

Green group hint: That smarts!

Blue group hint: Rockers know these well.

Purple group hint: You might write one out to pay a bill.

Answers for today’s Connections groups

Yellow group: Interval.

Green group: React to a stubbed toe.

Blue group: Guitar effects pedals.

Purple group: ____ check.

Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English Words

What are today’s Connections answers?

The yellow words in today’s Connections

The theme is interval. The four answers are patch, period, spell and stretch.

The green words in today’s Connections

The theme is react to a stubbed toe. The four answers are curse, hop, wince and yell.

The blue words in today’s Connections

The theme is guitar effects pedals. The four answers are delay, reverb, wah and whammy.

The purple words in today’s Connections

The theme is ____ check. The four answers are blank, coat, rain and reality.

Toughest Connections puzzles

We’ve made a note of some of the toughest Connections puzzles so far. Maybe they’ll help you see patterns in future puzzles.

#5: Included «things you can set,» such as mood, record, table and volleyball.

#4: Included «one in a dozen,» such as egg, juror, month and rose.

#3: Included «streets on screen,» such as Elm, Fear, Jump and Sesame.

#2: Included «power ___» such as nap, plant, Ranger and trip.

#1: Included «things that can run,» such as candidate, faucet, mascara and nose.

Technologies

My Kid Wanted Video Games. I Was Against It. This Console Gave Us Both the Win

The movement-based Nex Playground might be the antidote to parental screen time guilt.

When our 8-year-old started asking for video games, I knew we were about to engage in an uphill battle. Anytime we’ve been to friends’ houses with gaming consoles, he goes full zombie mode, then has an epic meltdown once the sensory overload wears off. And since he inevitably ropes his 6-year-old brother in, we’re essentially sealing both their fates.

So when our neighbors started raving about a movement-based gaming console called Nex Playground, my first instinct was to shut it down. The words «gaming console» alone were enough to put me in a mental block. Add in my own memories of Wii tennis sessions where I nearly took out the ceiling fan, and I was firmly in the «no» camp.

But after doing a little more research, I was intrigued enough to try it out.

Screen time isn’t something I take lightly. With three kids ages 2 to 8, my husband and I have always been intentional about how and what they watch. They don’t have their own tablets, and most of their screen time happens on our family TV, which means whatever the oldest is exposed to quickly trickles down to our toddler. So anything we bring into the house has to work for all of them. Tall order, I know, but the Nex Playground gets surprisingly close.

Getting started is easy

The console itself is refreshingly simple. It’s a small cube, slightly larger than a Rubik’s cube, with a circular camera and motion sensor, a light indicator and two ports for power, and an HDMI connection to the TV. There’s no controller beyond a basic remote for navigating menus. For most games, your body is the controller.

Setup is quick. Plug it in, connect it to your TV, and you’re ready to go. It doesn’t store video or upload footage to the cloud, which was an immediate plus. It also comes with a magnetic privacy cover that you can put on the lens when it’s not in use.

At $250, it’s not cheap, but it’s less than some of the popular gaming consoles for this age range, like the Nintendo Switch 2. That gets you a five-game starter pack: Fruit Ninja, Go Keeper (soccer), Starri (think Guitar Hero for your whole body), Party Fowl (an AR emoji frenzy) and Whack-a-Mole. Additional games require a subscription: $89 a year or $49 for three months, which unlocks a library of 50-plus games and counting. New titles dropped even as I was writing this.

The library spans a surprisingly wide range. There are board game adaptations like Connect Four and Candy Land, character-driven games with Peppa Pig, Bluey and the Ninja Turtles, and sports like baseball and, yes, tennis — minus the ceiling fan hazard. There’s even parent-friendly content like Zumba workouts, which I may or may not have fully committed to on a rainy afternoon.

Even my toddler has gotten in on the action, mostly bouncing her way through Hungry Hungry Hippos when her brothers finally concede.

Gameplay is where it wins

The movements range from swinging your arms to keep a ball in motion, hopping or full-body launches that are far more aggressive than what the game actually requires. (I’m not about to tell the kids otherwise.) After a 45-minute session, my kids are tired and sometimes even drenched in sweat. The Nex Playground entertains and burns energy in one fell swoop.

The graphics also seem intentionally simple and arcade-like, which fits the minimalist play experience. There’s no POV storyline to get lost in, no leveling up into a new world at 9 p.m. on a school night. Some games keep score, which awakens my kids’ competitive streak, but the vibe is more collaborative and hasn’t been the catalyst for more fighting like other games. If anything, it’s done the opposite.

I still don’t love defaulting to a screen when my kids are bored, so we try to use it in moderation. In our house, piano practice is the only thing that unlocks weekend play time, and the fact that they’ll sit at the piano for a full hour tells you everything you need to know.

The verdict that matters most

But the real test: Does it hold up to an 8-year-old who was dead set on a Nintendo Switch?

Short answer: yes. At least for now. He’d still pick the Switch if you asked him, but not for the reasons you’d expect.

«The Playground is more tiring,» he told me, which only helped seal the deal for me. His current favorite is Homerun Hitters. «It’s basically a baseball game where you go against ranked global players. Me and my brother are really good at it.»

This from a kid whose primary hobby is annoying his younger brother. The fact that he said «me and my brother» as a collective was an unexpected bonus.

The Switch may still show up on the Christmas list this year. And realistically, I know I’m on borrowed time. As kids get older, «cool» becomes the currency, and a motion-based cube probably won’t hold up against an Xbox or a Switch once playdates turn into side-by-side gaming sessions.

The Nex Playground isn’t a replacement for those. It’s more of a detour; it gives them a taste of gaming without all the usual side effects. Even if I do eventually cave, I can still see it sticking around for the occasional family game night or as a rainy-day sibling diffuser.

In the meantime, I’ll relish this simpler version of gaming while I still can. He’s not exactly rushing me to return this review unit. More importantly, neither am I.

Technologies

Don’t Wait for New Emoji in iOS 26.4, Here’s How to Create Them on Your Own

If your iPhone has Apple Intelligence, you can create your own emoji now.

Apple will likely add new emoji to your iPhone when the company releases iOS 26.4. Those new emoji could include an orca, a distorted smiley face and more. According to Emojipedia, there are 3,953 emoji with more on the way. The current list of emoji include smileys, sports players, weather conditions and flags. But there’s no emoji for a dog wearing pajamas, a plate with burgers and fries and many other things. But if you have Genmoji on your iPhone you can create these emoji and many more.

Apple released iOS 18.2 in 2024 and the company introduced its own emoji generator, called Genmoji, to Apple Intelligence-capable iPhones at that time. The Unicode Standard, a universal character encoding standard, is responsible for creating new emoji, and approved emoji are added to all devices once a year. With Genmoji, you don’t have to wait for new emoji to appear on your iPhone each year. You can just create them as you need them.

Read on to learn how to use Genmoji on iPhone to create your own custom emoji. Just note that only iPhones with Apple Intelligence, like the iPhone 17 lineup, can use Genmoji at this time.

How to make custom emoji

1. Open Messages and go into a chat.
2. Tap the plus (+) button next to your text box.
3. Tap Genmoji.

You can then type a description of an emoji into the text box near the bottom of your screen and tap the check mark on your keyboard to enter that description into Genmoji. You can also tap different suggestions and themes that are right above the text box. And with iOS 26 or later, you can also combine and use emoji to create others rather than describing a new emoji or using suggestions.

Your iPhone will generate a series of new emoji for you to pick from according to your description, and you can swipe through these new emoji. When you find the one you want, tap Add in the top right corner of your screen and the new emoji will be available to use as an emoji, tapback or a sticker. Now you don’t have to wait for the Unicode Standard to propose, create and bring new emoji to devices.

For more iOS news, here’s what to know about iOS 26.3.1 and iOS 26.3. You can also check out our iOS 26 cheat sheet for other tips and tricks.