Since there was no coding last week, instead I’m going to talk about the games. Specifically Journey, since, in my probably dated and conservative idea of just what constitutes a “game,” Journey is probably the only one of the ones we played that fits my definition.
I remember discussing in class last week the impersonality of Journey. I don’t remember who or in what context, but the idea was floated that Journey wasn’t really interactive—or, rather, our player wasn’t really interacting with the other players (the strangers we met on our “journey”)—because we were unable to speak and neither of us knew what the other was thinking or saying or doing. I wasn’t sure exactly what to make of that at the time. I played the game, if only for a few minutes. Still, I felt like I was communicating with the other player. Enough that I was talking to them. Which, don’t let me get grand with you, was weird. So then I watched the video for the Kickstarter campaign that David posted to Slack. There’s a video on the page that features Austin Wintery, the game’s music composer, in which he comments on the “personal and varied experiences” that people have during game play. And then Melissa Snoza, of Fifth House Ensemble, articulates it even better:

You get plopped into this empty desert, and you have no instruction as to what to do, and along the way you meet people and you interact with them, and you realize that you need them. And you see the ways they interact with you even though you can’t talk. And there are things about that experience that made me understand more about myself, that made me shocked to realize that I could learn about the people that I was interacting with. And I couldn’t believe that there were people who would play the game over and over and over again for the sheer joy of helping somebody else to experience what is so beautiful about the game for the very first time.

Part of what I think she’s getting at is that, in Journey, you’re there to help people and to be helped. Like Hurt Me Plenty, sans spanking: There’s only the tenderness.

Snoza talks about people playing the game over and over again. At first glance, this seems kind of dull. There’s only one narrative, one path, one way to go from start to finish. Scott, obviously, knows this. He said he’d played the game many times—enough to be able to accurately gauge how long it would take to get from start to finish. Still—he played “over and over again.”

The goal of Journey, the pleasure of Journey, is the interaction with strangers. And it’s not like the interaction that I imagine happens in games like World of Warcraft. You’re not there to kill anything—you’re only there to help and be helped. And I think there’s a kind of vulnerability in that that is pleasurable to people. Of course, I’m pretty sure that you can play “teams” in games like WoW, but it’s not the same when your shared objective isn’t to help people, but to eliminate them from the game. Sure, you’re helping each other (the other members of your team), but you’re helping each other to harm strangers. And I think that’s the beauty of Journey—you’re helping utter strangers! These are people who in all likelihood could be awful, terrible people. But you don’t know that. They could just as easily be wonderful people. And so you give them the benefit of the doubt. And nobody needs a safe word.