During a particularly anxious morning, I find myself using my known good chillout remedy: Hot tea, rainymood.com, and the soundtrack to the video game Journey.
Journey holds a special place in my heart. For those of you who haven’t played it, it’s an incredibly simple game that’s exclusive to the PS4. There are no words. No instructions. No fight mechanics. You walk, jump, glide and chirp. That’s it. Yet there is still a story to the game which is slowly uncovered as you move from area to area through images and hieroglyphs. By the end you’ve seen the ups and downs of a civilization, seen despair, and finally in the end beautifully executed hope. And while the game itself is incredible in it’s ability to convey so much with so little, what really stuck with me is the multiplayer.
During your journey other players can pop in and out of your game. It’s not required, you aren’t prompted. You have no idea who this other human being is with no gamer tag and no method of communication outside of a simple “chirp” which also serves to refill each other’s ability to jump and glide. My first time playing this game I met one such soul at the very beginning. Wandering around, I see this person in the distance. He chirped, I chirped back. We started following each other around, and if we found a secret area, or an item increase our ability to glide, we’d sit there and chirp like mad until the other person got it too. If one of us paused, the other waited. And as we played, and gained longer glide abilities, we were so able to time our chirping to each other so perfectly that we no longer had to walk, we flew through every level together.
I remember getting to the very end, and for a moment, I’d lost him. I had no idea where he’d gone and I worried. There was no way I was finishing this without him and I was steps away from the game’s final moments. And I remember the relief when he appeared again. In that beautifully done finale of the game, the two of us soared together and I just remember thinking “how on earth is it that this simple non-verbal game could make me feel a bond with a complete stranger like this?”. And as the final credits finish, it shows you the gamertag of the people you met on your journey, and for me there was only 1. That’s when we got a ping through the playstation network, from that person, just saying “Thanks for the journey :)”.
I play a pretty wide spread of games, but one common thread among my favorites list are games that can make you feel something. And I don’t mean just good feelings either. I believe in experiencing the whole gambit life has to offer. I’ve played games that make me terrified. Games that made me reevaluate my views on topics, sometimes by challenging my beliefs in ways that may not be comfortable. Games that have made me feel a connection to completely fictional characters, and even some that have brought my close to tears. It is a medium that drives home emotion in ways that no other method ever has managed for me. No movie or book has ever managed to make me scared, thoughtful, accomplished, happy or invested the way a well executed video game can. It’s in this ability to invoke emotion that makes me label video games “Art”.
Journey reminds me that you can have a meaningful connection with a complete stranger, and that hopefully even if it’s simple, brief and in passing, that it can make all the difference in someone’s day. For me the memory of that interaction brings me a smile, even on what would otherwise be a crumby morning.
Eat, Sleep, Geek, Repeat 