Journey, a “walking sim” first created by Thatgamecompany for the PS3, tells the story of … I’m not exactly sure who doing … I’m not actually certain what. While I’m sure this is in part because I didn’t complete a playthrough of the game, I get the impression, too, that Journey is very symbolic. It is clear, however, that Journey is a deeply narrative gameplay experience and is targeted at gamers who are interested in experiencing art or story through games. In my play of the iOS version of the game, I experienced emotionally and dramatically compelling narrative on multiple levels just through the game’s principle mechanic: walking. In Journey, walking allows you to bear witness to the narrative embedded in the world, and in the process of walking you enact another narrative altogether.
The elements of the physical environment through which you walk tell a story of the setting’s past. Most broadly, your character finds themselves completely alone wandering through a vast desert. The grandeur of the environment accentuates your characters solitude and suggests that something has happened to leave them stranded. The desert, you find, is littered with ruins, which begin to fill in the picture that there used to be a civilization here but something happened long ago to bring it to ruin. These ruins also have seemingly magical cloth and carpet scattered throughout them, which suggests to you that this fabric might have some relationship to this ancient society and that your character too, since the cloth reacts to them, might be related to it. This story is only uncovered by walking, with no other abilities or no other characters, through the world.
These discoveries aren’t strictly sequenced; walking being the means through which you discover them makes your experience of that narrative unique and personal. While there are guardrails, Journey does a great job of giving the impression that you are wandering aimlessly while you are being directed, so you get the joy of discovery without worrying about progressing. This enables you to piece the story together in your way, resolving ambiguity yourself and experiencing the time-line differently — based on, for example, whether you notice the discarded machines or cloth first. There was one moment where I found myself really struggling with a puzzle, and I was frustrated because I wasn’t seeking challenge from this game, but I was hooked on the fantasy, the discovery, and there was something keeping me from it; so, I think my one criticism of Journey is that sometimes the mini puzzles actually undermined both the player’s sense of discovery and narrative and the beautiful simplicity of walking as a story-telling medium.
As you navigate through the desert and ancient civilization, through darker caves and blindingly sunny dunes, you make the journey from a small sand dune to the glowing mountain top—doesn’t that sound like a story? You perform a whole hero’s journey as told through cut scenes and settings and abilities you discover you possess and troubles, even a darkest moment and an intervention! Your walking carries an emotional and dramatic arc that constitutes another story that you enact in the present—a story that you could possibly read or watch but that, as the article we read discussed, even just walking through you develop a more personal, immersive connection to.
While it is true that Journey’s gameplay is mostly “just walking”, labeling it as such discounts all of the looking and learning and appreciating you do as you walk and severely undersells just how much walking you do. Through their gameplay, players make a journey through the desert and a journey through the past, which sounds richer to me than anything that ought to be preceded by “just.”
Ethics:
I stopped playing just as I started to identify that there were a lot of abandoned machines scattered through the desert and one came to life, but I could imagine that the machines had something to do with the doom of the civilization you encounter. That and an abandoned civilization, generally, allude to some potential past violence; however, outside of that Journey is completely devoid of violence. In fact, that the story Journey tells may actually contain some degree of violence makes it even more impressive, and inspiring, that its creators were able to tell that story without violence—with only walking. A lot of important stories contain violence or violent undertones, but walking sims like Journey are proof that you can tell a story, even a violent one like the extinction of a society, without incorporating violence into the design. This exclusion of violence makes the storytelling much more subtle and much more matter-of-fact. Yes, I experienced the gravity and consequences of a civilization’s ruin, but I didn’t actually have to experience the ruin itself and fight viscerally against it. This is because I understood it through clues from the past. I think avoiding violence drives games away from enacting stories and towards embedded narratives when the story they want to tell includes violence.
