During the brief period I lived in the woods while working at an outdoor adventure camp, there was only one spot where I could kind-of, sort-of, get phone reception. I’d hike up to the far corner of the camp’s parking lot, hold out my lil’ 2010 flip-phone, and jerk my body around in a pastiche of modern dance until I found a spot that might sustain a call for a minute or two.
Recently, I went back to that camp to see a friend. At one point, I instinctively pulled out my phone but stopped myself, mumbling, “Right, no reception.” My friend smiled and said that things had changed, that the camp had just put in a tower, and now we could enjoy service from even on top of the red trail.
I walked to that same old spot out in the parking lot anyway. Sure, I’m a creature of habit, but I know that sometimes something is made nicer by the walk it takes to get there.
A Short Hike, a game released by Adam Robinson-Yu, is literally about taking a hike, as the name implies.
The player controls a small, bobble-headed anthropomorphic bird, à la Animal Crossing. As this bird-person, you have been dropped off to spend your summer with an aunt, who is a ranger in the local state park. You wake up one morning and are eager to receive an important phone call. But there’s a problem: there’s no reception in the woods. In order to get the call, you’ll have the travel to the top of Hawk Point Peak, only a short hike (heh HEH) away from your aunt’s cabin.
And therein starts your journey. At your aunt’s encouraging, you set out along a sea-side trail towards Hawk Point Peak. You can follow the trails, or not. You can walk, or run, or glide on your lil’ bird wings. You can even climb up the rock faces that populate the woods. However, you quickly learn that — at first — you can only climb short distances, or glide for a little bit, or dash for just a moment.
If you manage to make it to the Hawk Point Peak trailhead with this little bit of energy, you’ll find a rock face that is too steep and that will tire you out if you try to climb to its top. In order to build up the stamina to make the full hike, you need to complete small tasks for the locals in order to earn golden feathers, each of which gives you the ability to climb a little higher, or run a little farther.
So, suddenly, you have a reason to leave the trails and explore a little deeper, since only then will you find enough golden feathers to make the climb. It’s a common mechanic, but one made more delightful here with the relatively small scope of the game. Sure, Hyrule becomes deeply familiar when you play enough Breath of the Wild, but that can take hours and hours of tooling around. A Short Hike is a delicate little present of a game, easily completed in an hour or two. So, the transformation of the landscape from unfamiliar to personal is a quick yet satisfyingly-earned click.
It didn’t hurt that, as I neared the peak, the music — a charmingly upbeat soundtrack by Mark Sparling — changed ever-so-slightly: a tempo quickening, a new major chord, a sonic map to compliment the lay of the land. It encouraged me to peek into corners, excited to see what new things I would see and hear. As my collection of golden feathers and, therefore, stamina grew, I got more adventurous with my climbs, following every “what’s over there?” impulse and being rewarded with new characters to interact with, golden feathers to collect, and vistas to behold.
Though I was solving puzzles and doing adventuring, A Short Hike reminded me a lot of the “walking simulators” I’ve played and loved, games that — as I’ve said before and will say again — have often earned a bad rap. In video game parlance, a “walking simulator” is a descriptor attached to games whose main method of action is exploration via (you guessed it) walking. The term “walking simulator” is usually used as a pejorative, meant to distance said games from “real games” that show more obvious proof of a player’s technical prowess.
By contrast, walking simulators usually have either very light or nearly no requirements for gameplay finesse: there usually isn’t an enemy to sneak past, or someone to snipe, or a timed element to race against. Instead, the so-called walking simulators focus on narratives, allowing the story to unfold through the player noticing and piecing together bits from the surrounding environment. There might be some light puzzle elements, but 100% completion is usually not a requirement. As such, these games are sometimes rebranded in a more positive light as exploration games.
I actually prefer the term walking simulators, mostly because I think there’s ample opportunity to re-center the importance of taking a walk.
Recently, I read Jenny Odell’s excellent How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Despite the title, it’s not really a book about learning to do nothing; it offers no such advice for “unplugging” from the digital landscape, nor guide on how to self-help your way to enlightenment. Odell, instead, focuses on “resisting,” meaning that her central treatise is actually quite active and the opposite of do-nothing.
Early in the book, Odell re-tells a parable of a knarled tree. The tree is too warped and ugly to be used for lumber, so it is instead left to grow and lives for generations beyond its woody brethren. Odell is in search of how to be like the tree: how to grow and flourish outside of the capitalistic imperative to add value or productivity.
It’s difficult to allow ourselves to become warped: we are primed to be productive. Our current world is full of millions of little things designed to demand our attention: like a switchboard with too many little lights going off at once, being inundated with notifications and emails and pings and alerts and news and feeds means that we’re only able to give each item a small drip of our attention. We are, after all, creatures with finite resources (and time is certainly one of those resources). Being so flooded by calls to action means that we’re constantly in a state of response and, Odell argues, thus less and less likely to be critical and thoughtful about the world.
To be critical and thoughtful requires actual, literal time. And quiet. And periods of reflection over “productivity.”
In a recent article for The Atlantic, culture writer Ian Bogost reflects on Untitled Goose Game, and used his review to springboard into a larger argument that all video games are actually work. He writes, “To enjoy [video games], you have to play them. And playing them requires exerting the effort to operate them. Games are machines, and broken ones at that. The player’s job is to make them work again.” He continues, “It’s easy to pass the eyes over the pages of a book, or to bathe in the waves of image and sound at the cinema or in your living room” but that video games “demand toil in leisure’s pursuit.”
In this line of argument, video games are a part of the attention economy, as Odell defines it, and, as such, they drive the player away from the ability to criticize and comment on the world. Bogost argues that the “gamification” of capitalism (e.g. points-based rewards systems, badges received for using an app a certain number of times) shows that gaming is just a veneer for unpaid labor, labor that is masked as leisure. He uses a term coined by game theorist Julian Kücklich, “playbor,” to describe this genre fuzziness and confusion.
Surprising perhaps absolutely No One, I find this argument to be completely hollow. Writer Ana Valens wrote a comprehensive rebuttal on Twitter in which she picks apart Bogot’s article from different angles, but mainly asserts that labor requires that one produces something of marketable value, and that “nothing material is created by playing a game. One could argue playing basketball is labor, but if it's a pick-up-game with no strings attached, it's not. It's just play.” (emphasis mine)
The confusion between labor and play is, according to Valen, especially hard to discern if you’re a white, cis, man writing an article about video games to earn a living (“Goose Game isn't playbor unless you're playing the game for a reason beyond playing the game. Such as: 1) You're a Twitch streamer 2) To create viral memes for clout 3) You're a games critic for The Atlantic”). Valen instead re-focuses on the importance of play, especially for groups from marginalized communities: “Play brings meaning and enjoyment for its own sake when you're queer. Play is queer, as are, one could argue, games (per Bonnie Ruberg)”
Though I agree wholeheartedly with Valens’ argument, I do see why Bogost might be confused. Video games might not be labor, but they (like many pretty much anything made by humans) reflect back our values and expectations, which are currently centered around the exultation of capitalism.
It’s a little like the chatbot AIs that were built to emulate human speech. They only way they could “learn” language was to have massive amounts of already-existing text uploaded into their system. This text, since it was created by humans, was full of human biases. You can try to exorcise racism and sexism and any other -ism from the uploaded text, but there will always be blind spots.
Consider: if we were to replace all human doctors with robots, those robots would have to be programmed with input by existing human doctors. So, if human doctors already hold an implicit bias against black folks, it’s very likely that they will pass on that fatal error into their robot counterparts, since it’s a bias that’s “invisible” to them. You make a reflection of yourself, because you consider that to be “normal,” flaws included.
So, for video games, it would make sense that they would contain echos of the world as it exists: one filled to the brim with capitalistic imperatives. For example, in his article, Bogost references “grinding,” the practice in video games of repeating the same rote task in order to level up your character or gain experience. (Think: running around in high grass in Pokemon, and fighting the same lower-level enemies over and over in order to make your Pokemon stronger.) This, he says, is laborious.
However, I don’t think it’s actual labor. Rather, it’s not that video games are work, it’s that they resemble work.
In this instance, grinding supports the capitalistic belief that, by doing the same rote tasks over and over, that we are doing something of value, and that it means we will eventually “earn” a greater reward. It’s a digital confirmation of the “self-made millionaire” fallacy.
Or, perhaps, we could look at how “real gamers” are folks who have advanced technical skills in games, thereby affirming a societal belief that a person only has value in that they are able to work—or, in this case, something that looks like work.
Or we could even look at video games filled to the brim with quests and side quests and collectibles, all of which are used to both justify a higher retail cost for the video game (“more countable things = more value”) and also normalize a world in which holding multiple high-attention jobs is de rigeur.
Our digital works reflect back our analog world. Though video games aren’t labor or work — you are electing to do something and nothing material or sellable is created from it — that doesn’t mean they can’t be insidious in a different way. These reflections affirm the ideas of the powerful over and over again until it becomes hard to imagine any other reality. After all, if our “escapist” past-times simply reflect our lived realities, where can you truly “escape” to?
I’ll answer my own rhetorical question: we go for a wander.
In How to do Nothing, Odell advocates for the practice of noticing. In her daily life, she practices this by listening to birds, or trying to identify the plants in her neighborhood. She pushes back against our contemporary world’s desire for every bit of our attention by making active decisions to redirect attention to her environment for no other edification besides her own.
Playing A Short Hike feels similar: there is no agenda besides “take a walk,” and nothing but a desire to see what’s around the corner. However, it’s something more than just a digital representation of a nice real-life feeling. Bogost’s argument that games were work started with "to enjoy them, you have to play them.” He framed this as a negative, but it’s actually one of video games’ strongest pluses: they are media that is inherently empathetic. You put yourself into a character’s shoes, explore the world through their eyes, and perhaps come to form a connection with their mind-set.
Walking simulators, then, serve to remind the player about the importance and joy of noticing in my everyday life. They imagine a world in which this act is prioritized and cherished.
After playing A Short Hike, I walk to the grocery store without my phone. I say hi to the local cats. I hear a choir practice going on in the church on the corner. I notice the profiles of folks as they pass in cars. I can tell that my shoes needs to be re-soled. I notice a penny on the ground and pick it up, for good luck. I think, “Is that a ginkgo tree?” and pick a bright yellow leaf off the ground, holding it close to my face.
Perhaps part of the reason that “walking simulators” are maligned or discounted is because they don’t readily adhere to what we’re taught to see as valuable. There is no grinding, no side quest, no pings and beeps clamoring for our attention. Instead, there is just a gentle suggestion: walk, and see what you notice.
Video games might be a reflection of ourselves, and that reflection might often come with all the baggage we’ve accumulated as a society. Still, there is a desire within each of us to do what we will, and that desire peeks out every once in a while in the art we make. Sometimes all we need is a good walk to clear our heads.