The average American now spends about seven hours a day looking at a screen. Teen depression rates have tracked the smartphone’s adoption curve so closely that even the most cautious researchers have stopped pretending that it’s a coincidence. We have engineered an attention economy, and the people most hooked on it (including yours truly) tend to be aware of it. We can feel the costs, but we just can’t find a way out. The hidden cost that doesn’t show up in our screen time dashboards is the effect on our idea of community. A generation ago, a “neighborhood” implied potlucks, borrowed ingredients, and overall people you shared lives with. Now, it implies a Nextdoor account. Friendship is a Discord server, and mourning has turned into a mere comment or reaction on a post. Even the closest interactions nowadays are routed through the same devices that we do work on. The infrastructure of our private lives has been merged with that of our jobs.
This makes it strange that the games we reach for to recover from being online keep reproducing the conditions of being online. Even though games like Eastshade offer a soothing fantasy of manageable freelance labor as a cure to capitalism, A Short Hike does something more radical. It provides us with a fantasy of digital disconnect, through which we rediscover the kind of community and ‘neighbor’ network that we’ve spent the last decade letting wither.
The contrast between A Short Hike from other ‘cozy’ games is pretty stark. Take Animal Crossing, or Stardew Valley for example, which I’d argue are effectively productivity software. NPCs’ affection runs on a schedule and friendships are measured by gift quotas. These games calm me down in the same way that removing an item from my to-do list, or responding to all my emails do.
Kagen makes this argument in Wandering Games. She writes that under late capitalism, leisure “doesn’t exist, is quickly disappearing, or has been transformed into a guilt-ridden misery”. Games have grown increasingly like labor, and our hobbies have been monetized and rebranded. In Chapter 3 Kagen looks at Eastshade, the painter-simulator that at a surface level appears to solve some of the burnout and capitalistic issues people face on a daily basis. The game is, as Kagen argues, “a fantasy tailor-made to soothe the particular terrors of late capitalist precarity.” In reality, you are doing graphic design work, and are merely feeding into the fantasy of being a satisfied freelance worker.
A Short Hike structurally rejects this. The phone dies before anything else can begin; disconnection is the fundamental driving force. By forcing you to look up at a view, a stranger, or at the staggering cliff in front of you, the game smuggles in part of Kagen’s ‘work’ theme, what she dubs “unproductive, contemplative, anticapitalist play.” It feels like a vacation.
Where the game lands its biggest blow is in what it fills its cozy mountain with. Kagen describes Eastshade’s landscape as a “domesticated sublime,” as it doesn’t invoke terror but still manages to inspire awe in the player. Hawk Peak fits this mold – but instead of filling its world with ‘errands’ as in Eastshade, the tasks in A Short Hike like finding shells or a headband feel as if you don’t owe anything to anyone. They feel like favors, not assignments. There is no quest log, there are no overarching goals, you can play the game as you please. It is up to you to remember (or not) what the community needs. The Golden Feathers are bought with unmonetized kindness. Much like kids played basketball in the cul-de-sac, or raced around the block, you can play as much Beachstickball as you please or race to touch the lighthouse door. In essence, A Short Hike is a memorial to what community used to mean before it was routed through cables. The phone signal Claire climbs toward is the connection that nowadays we gravitate towards, but the point of the game lies in the fact that the connection she actually needs is the one she finds on the way up through the mutual collaboration with and aid of strangers.
A skeptic might note that A Short Hike is itself a digital product and that the recovery from screens is happening by looking at one. I’d argue that the game’s format shuts down that critique. There is no clock, no login ritual and no streak to maintain. When Claire answers the call at the top of the summit, the game is effectively over. A Short Hike releases you back into your own life.
Kagen ends her chapter on Eastshade by noting that the game “remains within a loving relationship with late capitalism.” It can’t even fathom wanting anything other than meaningful work. A Short Hike imagines and embodies something greater. Not a better job, not better tools, but a community whose currency is showing up for each other and helping out.
