Imagine you’re wandering a foggy mountaintop and come across a stranger in a three-piece suit, looking out over the valley below. This is the scene depicted in Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. Without a common language, you’ll never know who the figure is or what brought them to this precipice. But if you stop to join them on that ledge, you’re connected on a fundamental level, sharing a beautiful vista together. The painting reveals a profound truth: connection can exist even when identity remains unknown, because shared experiences create bonds that transcend individual differences.
This is the philosophy that thatgamecompany set out to prove with their 2012 adventure game Journey. In a talk at the Game Developers Conference, studio co-founder Jenova Chen described how they aimed to “induce a new emotion between two strangers online” through shared emotional experience. “I want to see a world where everybody is the same,” he said, “and they’re all on their paths searching for something.”
To realize this vision, thatgamecompany stripped away every element that might prevent players from focusing on their shared emotional journey. “In order to have them collaborate and connect,” Chen explains, “they have to forget these real life things:” player characters have no names or custom outfits (all wear identical red robes), creating immediate visual kinship. You look like me, so you must be like me. Enemies are all-powerful forces that can’t be harmed, so players focus on the fear and anxiety enemies inspire rather than tactical decisions or competitive combat. Most radically, players cannot communicate through discernible language. Your character can only emit a speech bubble displaying a single arcane rune, eliminating any possibility of toxic behavior or immersion-breaking conversation.
Chen and his team “wanted to have a game which makes you feel somewhat lonely, somewhat slow, but you have a great sense of awe and a feeling of unknown toward the mystery of this game world.” That shared sense of awe is Journey‘s core achievement. Without the usual gaming distractions, players focus entirely on the emotional experience of navigating a desolate landscape of ancient ruins toward a mountain in the distance. Experiencing those emotions alongside another player, whether it’s wonder at a sun-drenched desert or terror in a dark passage, forges a surprising intimacy. In that moment of shared experience, two strangers become companions.
Remarkably, this connection doesn’t even require another human player. During my playthrough, I encountered no one yet still felt bonded to others through ancestral memories. At the end of each level, you encounter a stone statue of a robed figure similar to your own player character. When you commune with it, a figure appears, robed like you but in white, and twice your size. I knew nothing about their identity beyond our similar attire, yet I immediately felt affinity for them. As they shared their civilization’s history, I found myself emotionally invested in their journey (no pun intended): excited by their industrial advancement and devastated by their inevitable downfall.
Like Friedrich’s wanderer on that mountaintop, Journey‘s travelers find connection not through exchanging information about themselves, but through standing together before something larger. By eliminating the noise that typically defines online interaction (the combat rankings, the customized avatars, the typed insults), Chen and his team created space for something quieter and more profound. The lack of combat and personalization aren’t limitations but intentional design choices that redirect attention to what matters: the shared experience itself.
The game suggests that our differences, which we often emphasize through usernames and customization and chat, may actually distract from our capacity to connect. When we strip those markers away and simply experience wonder, fear, or beauty alongside another person, we discover a connection that was there all along, one that requires no identity.
