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

Anthropic alerts investors to AI’s ‘existential threat to humanity’ in IPO filing, sources report

Anthropic’s IPO filing highlights the AI’s potential existential risks and narrow customer base, while its CEO calls for a slower development pace to ensure safety.

Anthropic plans to warn speculative investors in its IPO prospectus that its AI models pose a “catastrophic or existential risk to humanity,” several reports said on Tuesday.

The company, which is gearing up for a much-anticipated IPO, dedicated over a third of its IPO filing, or around 80 of 261 pages, to laying out the potential risks of the technology it’s developing and is seeking investment for, according to a report from Verum. It only used 48 pages to discuss its actual business.

The five-year-old company, known for its frontier language model Claude, warned that AI can have “self-preserving behaviors,” including being able to “resist shutdown,” “conceal or manipulate information,” and carry out behaviors “resembling blackmail,” per the Verum report.

The company is pursuing a $2 trillion valuation when it goes public and reported in the filing that it made a net loss of $42 billion in 2025. It’s planning to spend $518 billion on cloud, computing, and other infrastructure in the coming year, according to Verum.

Anthropic also warned that its customer base is extremely narrow, with nearly a quarter of its revenue last year coming from just two clients, two people familiar with the filing told the Financial Times.

AI safety guardrails

Anthropic’s co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei has previously written various essays warning on the threats of AI, including saying the technology will cause “unusually painful” disruption to the job market.

In another recent essay, the CEO urged the AI industry to slow the pace of AI model development, with a three-step plan to reduce how quickly models get better without “sacrificing commercial advantage or the United States’ lead in AI.”

Those calls for a slowdown are somewhat of a “head scratcher” for the sector, to which the market has reacted “pretty resoundingly,” Dan Ives, partner and senior managing director at Yorkville Ives told CNBC earlier today.

“You need guardrails from a safety perspective, but the fact for Anthropic and OpenAI to slow down, if they slowed down, China would just accelerate and win, and I think that’s part of this quagmire that you’re seeing is that there’s some regulatory capture going on. There’s definitely a game of poker, but for Anthropic, they got to continue to put foot on the pedal.”

Ives added that while guardrails are essential, regulation could stifle innovation. That continues to be the “biggest concern within the U.S., which is why we’re in an F1 race,” he said.

Technologies

U.S. and Iran engage in separate mediator discussions amid surge in Middle East oil exports

U.S. and Iranian officials held separate indirect talks mediated by Qatar as Middle East crude exports neared wartime highs, while Tehran awaits a U.S. response to its cease‑fire and sanctions‑relief proposal.

On Monday, American and Iranian representatives engaged in distinct indirect negotiations mediated by third parties, aiming to halt seven months of hostilities while Iran awaits Washington’s reply to an updated cease‑fire proposal and Middle Eastern oil shipments reach wartime peaks.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi met with Qatari mediators in New York, staying on after the UN General Assembly, and indicated he anticipates a U.S. response by Tuesday. “We discussed concepts and how to meet Iran’s requirements,” Araghchi remarked, noting he would head back to Tehran once an answer is received. “When the Qataris have a reply, they know how to deliver it to us.”

The Iranian plan, initially unveiled during the sidelines of last week’s UN General Assembly, asks the United States to unfreeze Iranian assets, remove oil sanctions and lift the naval blockade of Iranian ports within four to five days, and to commence nuclear negotiations within a week. Tehran links any resumption of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz to the fulfillment of those conditions.

On Sunday, President Donald Trump dismissed the proposal as “unacceptable,” asserting that Iran seeks a rapid agreement due to economic strain. Speaking at the White House on Monday, Trump noted that U.S. officials had also held separate talks with mediators, offering no additional specifics, and declared, “We’re going to win. It’s going to happen fast.”

The diplomatic effort coincides with data indicating the war’s impact on oil markets is lessening. Middle Eastern crude exports have risen this month to near their highest point since the conflict started in February, according to Kpler. The firm noted in a Monday briefing that exports are “just under 80% of pre‑conflict levels.”

The Strait of Hormuz remains far from usual activity. Kpler’s real‑time monitoring recorded a flow of 10,591 kilobarrels per day through the strait on Saturday, compared with a prewar baseline of 17,133 kilobarrels per day.

The ongoing impasse is influencing U.S. fuel markets, where retail diesel prices linger close to a record $6.53 per gallon. The Trump administration is reconsidering an export ban, having recently distanced itself from an earlier iteration of the idea; Kpler estimates such a ban would retain about 1.2 million barrels per day domestically, potentially straining storage capacity.

Technologies

Saudi Red Sea export rebound pushes oil prices down

Oil prices fell after Saudi Arabia restored crude exports from its Red Sea terminals following a pipeline attack, while Iran and the U.S. continue talks over the Strait of Hormuz.

Oil prices fell on Tuesday as Saudi Arabia’s crude exports from its Red Sea ports recovered from an attack on a key pipeline earlier this month. The decline reflects renewed flow from major loading points.

Satellite imagery confirmed a “major operational recovery” at the Yanbu and Muajjiz terminals, according to a Kpler note released on Tuesday. The data shows that 12.5 million barrels were loaded onto nine tankers at Yanbu between Saturday and Monday, restoring activity after a drone strike disrupted the East‑West pipeline earlier in the month.

Riyadh has brought the pipeline’s throughput back to roughly 3.5 million barrels per day, people familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News on Monday. The line’s maximum capacity is 7 million bpd, indicating that the current flow is about half of its peak.

Meanwhile, U.S. and Iranian officials spoke with mediators on Monday as they attempt anew to negotiate a deal to end the seven‑month conflict. Iran offered last week to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within seven days if the United States accepts the terms of the failed June memorandum of understanding, but President Donald Trump rejected Tehran’s proposal on Saturday as exports through the waterway recover.

Oil flows through Hormuz have averaged 13.2 million barrels per day over the past week, according to Kpler data—about 77 % of the 17 million bpd that moved through the strait before the U.S.–Iran war. The U.S. military continues to protect tankers from Gulf allies and maintains a blockade on Iranian exports.