Earlier this month at the Digital
Geographies Research Group Annual Symposium, whose theme this year was ‘Geographies
of Gaming and VR’, I ran a workshop introducing those attending the event to
the group of video games known as ‘walking simulators’. This was an opportunity
for the academics to try a type of game that they were less likely to be familiar
with, making use of six PCs/consoles in the room with the games Dear Esther,
Gone Home, The Stanley Parable, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, Firewatch and
What Remains of Edith Finch installed. The workshop then prompted participants to
think about what significance walking simulators might have when we think about
the geographies of video games and digital media more broadly.
Overall, I was pleased with how those
who attended engaged with the material I’d provided. It was my first experience
running a workshop of this kind, and I’m now more conscious of the kinds of considerations
I’d need to make when running a similar event in the future.
As expected for any workshop
involving computer equipment, there were some technical hitches involving the
hardware provided by the university hosting the symposium. In particular, I became
aware just how important functioning sound equipment is for the experience of playing
walking sims – e.g. listening to voice acting for communicating character,
ambient sound for its atmospheric, transportative qualities, and music for
emotion / mood / thematic cues. Earphones were provided by the university (admittedly
not high-quality) but on a couple of the machines we were unable to get the
sound to work properly at all.
Technical issues aside, however, I
was happy with how the workshop gave participants an understanding of what
these games are, how they are different from the AAA titles we so often see advertised
and discussed publicly, what their evolution has meant for the video games
medium, and why they offer some interesting vantage points for geographers
thinking about games using geographical concepts, including (sense of) place,
landscape, interfaces, post-phenomenology, and more.
Below is my presentation
material. It starts with an 8-minute clip from a play-through of the game Everybody’s
Gone to the Rapture, alongside the text and slides from my introduction to the
workshop. This is followed by links to a list of popular walking simulator
games and brief reading list that were provided as handouts on the day.
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Walking simulators could be
described as video games in which the gameplay is based on purposefully
exploring the environments represented onscreen to experience their affective
power, rather than their landscapes being backdrops to the gameplay. Often avoiding many mechanics typically associated with the video game
medium, such as those involving skill in button-pushing, win and loss
conditions, combat systems and player death, walking simulator games invite players
to explore rich virtual environments as
an end in itself – to be immersed into the affectively and emotionally
impactful scenarios that are present in their worlds.
One of the immediate questions
you might have, though, is ‘why are they called walking simulators’?
Well, the term has actually been quite a controversial one. It began in online
video gaming communities as a derogatory term, signalling that these types of
games offered limited possibilities for player interaction, compared to games
with complex mechanics that might require skill, dexterity or effort to master.
The only mechanical input from the player seemed to involve moving between
different points of interest in the environment and exploring what’s there,
rather than having any observable agency in shaping the game world. Because of
this, some have questioned whether walking sims can even really be considered
‘games’ at all.
Despite its negative
connotations, however, the ‘walking simulator’ term has largely been reclaimed
by those who make, support and enjoy these kinds of games. On Steam, the
leading platform for PC gaming, you can browse games tagged as ‘walking
simulators’ alongside those tagged as ‘action’, ‘adventure’, ‘horror’ and so
on. As they’ve become easier to find, buy, discuss and share, whole communities
of people have been built around games in the walking simulator ‘genre’. Even
for those who dislike the label, use of the term has become so pervasive that
it’s become almost universal in the games community.
Indeed, some would actually argue
that the ‘walking simulator’ term is an appropriate one for
understanding the kinds of experiences these games enable players to have. Games
scholar Rosa Carbó-Mascarell, for example, has argued that walking simulators
represent a digitisation of earlier Romantic and psychogeographical traditions
of exploration, in which walking is said to induce a mindful connection with
the spirit or sense of a place.
In drawing together the series of events you
encounter as you slowly navigate through the world, the gameplay of walking
simulators would also appear to enact well-established conceptions of walking
as a narrativizing practice that draws situated events into sequences.
It’s important to remember,
though, that in nearly all cases these games involve more than just walking,
particularly when you consider how players encounter information in the game
world. In a paper published online earlier this year, Melissa Kagen describes
the mechanic of ‘archival adventuring’ that’s used in many walking simulators,
in which players piece together a version of events by navigating between
carefully arranged materials in the game world, and forming their own
interpretations of them. An archival perspective recognises how the player’s
experience will necessarily be conditioned by how the information is organised
by the game’s developers, the gaps that are intentionally left by designers for
players to fill, and the game’s user interface, and not just how the player ‘walks’.
Before I finish, I want to
briefly address the influence these games have had in both the games industry
and wider sector of interactive digital media. What’s especially interesting is
that the vast majority of these games have been made by indie games developers.
Without the same costs as most AAA games in terms of animation, voice acting,
and complex UI systems, it turns out that the types of game that often fall
under the ‘walking simulator’ label can be relatively inexpensive to create.
However, they’re still able to reach a wide audience through popular platforms
such as the Steam store that sell content made by a broad range of developers.
Yet despite the limitations their
developers have to work with, games tagged as walking simulators have been
winning some of the biggest prizes in gaming. The wider industry has been
forced to take note. Particularly for AAA titles that aspire to tell some kind
of story, the bar’s been raised, as walking simulators have showed it’s
possible to tell stories in a highly emotionally engaging way without resorting
to cutscenes or series of objectives, which distance the player from the actual
storytelling process.
As a result, in recent years relationships between
mechanics and narrative have been at the forefront of game design thinking and discussion,
and this has led to some highly innovative examples of interactive storytelling
that work with the affordances of digital technology in newly compelling and
meaningful ways.
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Brief reading list introducing walking simulators and their possibilities/controversies.
List of suggested games labelled as 'walking simulators'.
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