For this response I am going to try to put Journey in conversation with Beacon. I hope I can make something interesting come out of it. We’ll see…

In “Search Engine Subjectivities,” Kris Cohen observes that, in Beacon, “Behind each search query, then…there is a searcher possibly near us in space and definitely near us in time, and however much or little access one feels one has to a person via their query, the searchers are granted some kind of mediated presence by beacon’s liveness” (8). I would like to suggest that there is a similar dynamic happening in Journey. While relationality in Beacon is far more ephemeral (the searchers likely don’t know that we are engaging is this weird kind of eavesdropping), there are special and temporal analogies.

The players in Journey are, obviously, playing at the same time, but I think there’s something weird about spatial relations in the game. While physically, in the real world, of course the players may or may not be anywhere near each other. I guess what’s contingent here is how invested a player is in his or her avatar. Is that the right word? Avatar?

Also, after the game ends, the players, like the searchers in Beacon, will once again be utter strangers. I don’t know if I can make it mean anything, but what if my neighbor was the other player in Journey? What if the gas station clerk was the person who just searched for “pipe cleaning equipment?”

I don’t think there’s any doubt that relationality in Journey is way more palpable than it is in Beacon, but I can’t help feeling like there’s something there. In terms of communication, in Beacon, strangers are communicating, whether they know it or not, their desire to know about something. And they must know that they’re communicating this to some more or less sentient thing. Or do people even consider this. Hm. Considering the, well, “intimate” nature of many of the searches, maybe not. Anyway, in Journey, though, communication is limited to chimes, which are far less specific than “ecu football schedule 2009.”

I’m really not sure what to make of all of this. Since this post is late, though, it’s unlikely that anyone will read it anyway.

Incidentally, I’m starting to think that Beacon is no longer live. I’ve seen some very specific search terms repeated between yesterday and today, and I think it’s unlikely that, in 2016, people are searching Dogpile for, among other date-specific things, a 2009 football schedule, information about Internet Explorer 8, and MySpace.