Over the past couple of nights, I’ve been making way through Journey. The game is stunningly, ridiculously visually beautiful: I’ve never thought computer-generated sand could literally give me shivers. There’s also a sense of beauty, however, to the gameplay mechanics – in particular, to the way in which the game manages online multiplayer.
Journey revolves around a robed figure travelling across a desert toward a cloud-cloaked mountain. That’s it. No princess trapped in a castle, beast to be vanquished, or world to be saved. The game begins in media res, and you simply start to walk (hopefully, but not necessarily, toward the mountain – the cues leading you there are subtle). The absence of a predefined narrative, backstory, or motivation prevents you from feeling as though you’re playing or replaying somebody else’s experience: this is your story.
The game feels achingly lonely for the first, perhaps, quarter hour. Not boring, not at all, but lonely: the absense of life around you is palpable. Relative to other games in which your figure is depicted from a third-person perspective, your traveller is small on screen in Journey. You don’t feel powerless, exactly, but there’s a sense of… things being thrown into perspective. The world is huge, and human beings are small. Why aren’t more games like this?
With these initial conditions established, something magical happens when you believe you can see another robed figure moving in the distance: you feel, almost immediately, an intense bond linking you to this other traveller. This other figure is a human being, playing through the same portion of the journey as you. You never discover any personal details about the human controlling the traveller, and your communicative possibilities are limited to moving around the game world or tapping to emit a harmonious song-shout.
This makes things interesting, as when communicative possibilities change, the relationships we are capable of forming change, too. If both travellers are anonymous, it would seem as though it would be tempting for at least one to exploit the other. But Journey prevents players from, for example, wielding weapons, and as a puzzle is unlocked, it is unlocked for the benefit of both players. There is no way, really, to exploit your fellow traveller. In fact, the ‘worst’ thing you could do would be to simply walk in another direction and wait for the other traveller to pass by. Similarly, even if it were possible to exploit fellow travellers, the absense of any metrics (a score chart, timer, levelling system etc) makes exploitation pointless: there is simply nothing to gain by taking something away from somebody else.
Not to give too much away, but Journey can be tricky. I’m confident a plethora of walkthroughs will emerge revealing how to easily ‘beat’ the game, but I’m just as confident most players will avoid these. The fellow travellers I played with appeared as confounded as I was, and part of the joy of the multiplayer was traversing the game world together to explore how things work, and, sometimes, simply to stop and marvel at the setting sun reflecting on the sand.
The inability to assign motives to other players in Journey makes it difficult to think negatively of them, but the ability of other players to assist you makes it extremely easy to think positively of them. In one case, a player would stand for several minutes for me on a ledge, waiting for me to arrive. I would do the same for him or her. I felt grateful to that player for resisting the temptation to simply power through. In other situations, that same player would get lost and tap to emit a shout – I’d follow them and lead them in the right direction.
Much of how we interact with other human beings is based on false judgements and stereotypes. Journey‘s multiplayer strips away the cruft that might cloud our perceptions (race, gender, appearance, age) and leaves players with a severely limited palette of possible interactions. By making it difficult to communicate, however, those harmonic shouts take on a multitude of meanings. And the fact that another player would stand and wait for me, while I blunder slowly behind, for no clear reason: I don’t know what that means, but it certainly seems to mean something. I think it might be something important.