When I first started playing “Journey”, I felt completely alone. I was in the desert with no signs of life, looking out at the mountains of sand ahead of me. I was reminded of Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, which depicts a man looking out on a seemingly endless world ahead. Unlike the wanderer, however, I soon discovered that I was not alone. I found and interacted with bird-like creatures, through which I found connection. They were not human and lacked individual identities, but they transformed my journey from lonesome survival to shared movement.
When playing, I found myself getting into a routine. I would search for signs of cloth waving around and walk in that direction. I then connected with them and freed them from being trapped. Once free, they would give me the ability to jump high, fly, or push me further towards my goal. Whenever I needed help, I could wait for one of the creatures to come near me, call out to them, and they would elevate me. I entered into a symbiotic relationship with these creatures, where I freed them and in turn they would help me. Through these nameless creatures, Journey argues that connection does not require identity; it requires response. Even in a world shaped by mortality, the game suggests that meaning persists when something answers your call and carries you forward.
Green’s “Googling Strangers” approaches connection from a completely different way. Green talks about a world where strangers feel less unknown because we are able to search up so much of their lives. He highlights how “less of our lives belong to us” as our photos, families, and histories are so readily available online. But this is not necessarily only a negative thing. Years after witnessing a severely burned child, Green finally googled the boy’s name and learned that he survived, providing him with relief. Green shows how accessible knowledge is incredibly powerful but it is uneasy because it depends on personal information on someone else’s life.
Green’s connection to the child depends on knowing what happened, saying that he wanted to google it, knowing that the knowledge could “save him or kill him”. In “Journey”, I did not have access to nor did I need that knowledge to have a connection. The creatures do not really have voices, profiles, or backstories and we don’t receive any real information about them. Connection here is built less on information and more on action. This especially matters because “Journey” is filled with signs of mortality. We pass by graveyards, abandoned broken buildings, and interact with a white ghost-like figure. The flying creatures interrupted the loneliness and mortality that I was interacting with. They were vibrant and filled with life. I felt connected to them even further when they assisted my experience.
When reading online, I saw that other players described the center of “Journey” to be the anonymous human multiplayer aspect – meeting a stranger and interacting with them, then having the identity revealed at the end. This would directly answer the question of connection without identity by giving players a real human companion without a known name until the end. My experience suggests that “Journey”’s idea of connection extends even broader than this. The game does not only pose a question about if strangers matter without being known; instead, it asks if anything can matter without being named.
This greatly contrasts with the ideas from Ozymandias. Shelley describes a king with a name, title, and description – “And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings” – but almost nothing meaningful of the actual statue remains. “Journey” reverses this idea, as the creatures I traveled with had no names but their presence was meaningful. Essentially, the king’s identity survived but there was no living connection. On the other hand, the creatures’ connection survived without identity.
So, is your journey made alone? My experience in this game suggests that the answer is no. My journey was shared with creatures whose identities remained unknown, but that mystery did not weaken the connection. In “Journey” meaning persists not because someone’s name is searchable online but because something answered when I called.
