The other night, I was discussing video games with a friend. With the year drawing to a close, it's normal for the subject to eventually turn to some sort of “year’s best” discussions. This friend and I rarely have much overlap in the games we play, which makes for enjoyable discussions. Usually, each of us comes away from a conversation with something new to check out.
In discussing the games of the year, and what had really stuck with us, we discussed a lot of the bigger “Triple A” titles of the year. Among others, we talked about Mass Effect 3, and Borderlands 2, and Dishonored—games that we’d both played and enjoyed. However, none of these, we agreed, really struck us as “the best of the year.” At one point, I was scrolling through the games on my Playstation’s hard drive to find something to show him. While I clearly had plans to show him something, these plans were changed as soon as he asked “Oh, what’s Journey?”
To be honest, Journey was a game that, while I’d finished it at release, I hadn’t gone back to since my first playthrough. I tried to explain the game to my friend, but quickly realized that a description of Journey wasn’t going to the game any sort of justice. A basic description of the game’s story (“there both is and isn’t one”), mechanics (“it’s a platformer”), or visual style (“you’re kind of a scarf-cape thing?”) wouldn’t do much to relate how special the game was. So, the only option I had was to simply start the game up and show my friend what it actually was. And, while he wasn’t entirely swept away by Journey, I certainly was.
Despite my initial intentions to simply play 20 minutes or so of Journey merely as a means to introduce my friend to its aesthetic and gameplay, I ended up completing it for a second time. In one sitting. This isn’t a particularly huge achievement; Journey is only about two to three hours long. However, this second playthrough reminded me of just how beautiful Journey is. Graphically, Journey is a marvel. It’s about as close as I’ve ever come to simultaneously causing and watching an animated film. Though Journey’s gameplay is simple, it is functional and smooth. The game’s music is excellent and bears a great deal of the narrative weight with ease.
After this latest playthrough, what has struck me most about Journey is the way it creates the majority of its story. Because it explicitly tells so little about its narrative, Journey deliberately creates a distance between itself and the player, a distance that is incredibly important to the game’s success.
In Understanding Comics, author Scott McCloud posits that most of the action in comic books takes place in the “gutters” between panels. What he means is that the panels themselves act as signposts for the reader, whose mind fills the spaces in between. What is inferred by the reader between panels is the true action of comics. In Journey, the division between game and player is a similar space. In this space, Journey’s story is inferred by, and so exists for, each player. By forcing this kind of narrative inference from the reader, Journey makes the player a collaborator. In this way, each player reads a story in Journey that is very much their story.
Journey provides beautiful imagery, wonderful music, simple (yet smooth) gameplay, and then forces the reader to develop their own story from these elements. In this way, Journey is a game that is very personal to each player. To say the least, one gets out what he or she puts in. Journey’s story can be as deep or as minimal as one desires. However, few games provide the possibility for narrative collaboration and subsequent depth as Journey.
So, what’s Journey? Game of the year, I guess.
#GOTY2012 #PS3 #Journey #Thatgamecompany
