How does walking play a story?
In the game The Stanley Parable (Ultra Deluxe), walking is just about all the agency you have as a player, since your game decisions boil down to what decisions you make. Mild spoilers for the game ahead, but you are repeatedly presented with the option to break the fourth wall and spite the narrator, choosing to go through the blue door when Stanley was predetermined to go through the red one. Going into the game fresh without any expectations is what many people consider the ideal way to play, since you get to discover the litany of possible outcomes depending on what routes and decisions you choose. The motivations for playing are different from other games with more concrete objectives; you must continually break more fourth walls and explore more pathways in order to ‘progress’ in the traditional sense. There aren’t really any parkour or time sensitive skill-checks, you simply just explore a world given the hints in your environment.
I found the associated article very interesting, as I had somewhat missed this specific part of gaming discourse on ‘walking sim’ being a point of denigration for anything non-militaristic. It’s easy to see why those with a very entrenched idea of what “real” video games are would have such a visceral rejection of anything that doesn’t align with the standards they were taught. First-person-shooter games make up such a large part of the video game scene and were considered so dominant in the space that for decades people thought of violence and video games as inextricably linked. While there were earlier generations of Quake, Doom, Wolfenstein, goldeneye, in my generation this dominance was perhaps even greater with the prevalence of Call of Duty/Halo on mainstream consoles and Counterstrike on PC. I am glad to not have grown up with these games, only first playing CS:GO in late high school, since the spaces I got to enjoy were cozy Nintendo games, early iOS apps, and very elaborate Minecraft worlds. If I had instead spent these thousands of hours in games where violence is the main mechanic and the negative-sum nature of war is the aesthetic, I imagine I would be a very different person, for the worse. I think much of what makes these games so effective at being military propaganda is the way the world building of these heroic war scenes are setting false expectations for the horrific reality of war. Though as an asterisk, I think it’s easily possible to overestimate games’ potential to shape one’s worldview, in that I don’t think games alone can be considered the culprit for shaping a violent worldview.
But back to the main question, how does walking tell the story? I like how the article put it, where this reduction of the game down to the mere mechanic of ‘walking’ is doing a disservice to all of the additive value that the world building actually employs. The only ‘violent’ mechanic in the game is the implied death upon reaching certain endings, but these do not compare whatsoever to wielding an automatic rifle of choice in the fight against an unspecified ‘terrorism’. One might say we are somewhat in this chicken and egg scenario that many rich clientele purchasing video games are rich off of the spoils of capitalism (Are colonialist video games popular because they’re better or because modern societies have ingrained the values of colonialism?). I think it’s important and awesome that there’s now such a diversity of games that provide an alternative imagination of the worlds we live in. Support indie games ok thx bye
