Everything in our this day and age is documented and easily available. As John Green notes in his essay Googling Strangers, we live in a loop of accessibility, where a few keystrokes can unearth someone’s entire life. Gone are the days of actually getting to know someone on a first date – you now stalk them on Instagram or if you’re really feeling ambitious, Linkedin. You get to know their interests, their friends, their career paths, all before getting to actually know them. Now, John Green argues that there is a silver lining to this. He leverages this technological ability to check in on a burn victim he remembered while working as a chaplain at a hospital. With certain extreme cases such as this hospital patient, I feel that it can be a useful way to verify or find information. Overall, however, I argue that a lack of information and direction actually leads you to learn more for yourself and explore enough to gain a deeper understanding of a situation.
Take Journey, for example. I played it on my phone, and even by the opening scene I was a little confused. You are able to maneuver around, but with little to no guidance. The only hint is a subtle monument in the distance at the peak of a mountain. As a result, however, you learn the controls by doing, trudging your way to the top of the sand dune towards the only objects in sight.
This process of unknown exploration perpetuated on throughout the gameplay. There was one massive monument an hour or so in where I was fully lost. The carpets had been guiding me and helping out where to go next, but fully lost them on my tiny phone screen. I spent about 20 minutes running around, trying to ascend the top of a windy hill that kept on pushing me back down, or making an impossibly long jump. I had no sense of direction or goal, but this forced me to dig deeper and think logically about where to go next. I circumnavigated the whole structure, looking for an entrance. Through that process I stumbled across random ruins depicting ancient images and glyphs. Furthermore, I gained more mastery of the controls and maneuverability, learning how to navigate in one direction while panning in another. If instead there existed a bright line indicating the pathway or a map with direct instructions, I would not have learned more about interacting with the game or some of the subtle easter egg type things from the game.
Tying it back to the first date situation, if you come in with a fixed mindset and predetermined set of conversation topics, it will likely lead to dead ends in conversation and a lack of true understanding of one another. However, by navigating the parkour ‘level’ of Journey and leveraging the environment and context clues, you’re able to gain more insight into the background of the characters and the rich history of the world created by the game makers.
All in all, detaching from this digital safety net, be in a glowing marker in a video game or a meticulously researched social media page ahead of a first date, restores the magic of discovery. Choosing to navigate one’s life without a predetermined map stops us from treating interactions as checklists to fulfill and we begin treating them more as landscapes to explore. We sacrifice the sterile albeit efficient search engine for a rich, nuanced, and authentic explorative connection. Though we treat uncertainty as a problem to be solved, Journey and the art of unscripted conversation offer stark reminders that getting lost and finding solutions yourself is the best way to find deeper meaning.
