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Featured reader review by zippdementia
March 30, 2012 In Phillip K. Dick's famous novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, there is a religion called Mercerism. By gripping the handles of an “empathy box,” a person would be transported to a virtual world in which they struggled endlessly up a mountain, their only guides being the silent personas of other people holding their own empathy boxes and taking the same journey.I wonder if Jenova Chen, creative director of Journey, ever read that book, because Mercerism defines the game. Journey is about climbing a mountain and the symbolic struggle represented by that. If you've played Flower you will be well prepared for the formula. There is a powerful opening, a dark climax with a washed-out color scheme, and then an explosive orgy of hues and expression at the end. Music, like it was in Flower, is a tremendous part of the game, serving perfectly to set the mood in each scene and to lend voice to the emotions that the game engenders. I cannot fault Journey for its formula just as I cannot fault the obvious metaphor of the mountain, for these are formulas and metaphors that we understand on an instinctual level to represent the journey of our lives. When it is treated with such grace, as it is here, the formula can be forgotten and replaced with appreciation. If the end of my life is half as beautiful as the end of Journey then I shall walk towards it with my head held high.
As soon as I finished the game, I realized that it would generate a lot of acclaim but that individual reactions would be polarized. There isn't much room for middle ground on Journey. The best way to describe it, I think, would be as interactive art. Journey is heavy on the symbolism and light on the gameplay. This will either impress you or annoy you and the game is short enough that it leaves little room to maneuver between the two feelings. For instance, those who are impressed will instantly find their attention held by the enticing depiction of an ancient desert full of sifting sands and endless horizons. Those who are annoyed will ask why there are invisible walls blocking off any exploration of those horizons.
I believe that anyone can appreciate the effort that has gone into crafting the aesthetic. It is a calming aesthetic. So calming, in fact, that I fell asleep the first time I played it. The game didn't mind. It simply sat my character down in the sand and played soothing music until I woke up. Waking up to its desert landscape felt no more unfamiliar than falling into my dream. The distinctions were blurred. The visual direction captures the kind of deliberate imprecision that fills a dreamworld. The screen is constantly filled with little activities in the corners that you seem to catch with a subconscious awareness rather than your watchful eye.
Despite this beauty, I was ready to be annoyed. I was not particularly enamored with the linearity and the emptiness. It felt a little bit like playing Shadow of Colossus without the colossus. Everything about Journey goes against what I would logically call successful game design. It follows an incredibly slow pace for only being a couple of hours long, it is focused on seeing instead of doing, and the accomplishments feel staged rather than earned. Aside from demonstrating keen aesthetic, I simply wasn't sure what the point of the game was. It was beautiful, but it wasn't moving.
Then something interesting happened. My journey began to have a story. I had a couple of encounters with other players that were the most memorable co-operative experiences I've ever had, and they didn't involve shooting zombies. I met someone in the ruins underneath the desert and ended up journeying the rest of the way to the mountain with him. When I first met him, I was the more powerful of the two. I could fly further and faster and would often lead us towards the next area, chirping at him in an oxymoronic attempt to encourage his progress. I also sacrificed for him, using my character as bait to lure off the flying sentinels that guard the mountain. By the time we reached the base of the mountain, their attacks had left me the weaker one, barely able to stand, and being led on through the blizzard by his chirps. The only way I was able to make it was because he stayed next to me the entire time, quite literally warming my character and giving me the strength to go on.
I saw my friend die on that mountain. This was not a scripted death. One second he was leading the way ahead of me up a wide snowfield. Then suddenly one of the sentinels swooped down from the sky and crashed into him with a scream. The impact tossed me into the air as if I were light as the snowflakes drifting around me. When I tumbled back to the earth, my friend was gone. I searched the area for 10 minutes, chirping for him frantically like a parent who has lost a child. You can't really get a game over in Journey, so to this day I don't know if he disconnected from the game or if we just lost each other in the storm. It doesn't matter. Either way, I had still lost a friend.
I met eight people in my journey and never more than one at a time. I don't know if that was by design or if I just happened to play at times when others weren't logged on. If it was by design, I cannot help but wonder if it was a limiting mistake. It would have been incredible to see thirty or forty people making their way up that last part of the mountain, all struggling towards that final goal. It certainly feels like Journey's vast emptiness was meant to be filled with those kind of numbers. Empathy only takes two, though. I'll never know the name of the first person I met but I'll never forget getting caught in an updraft with him at the edge of the desert. Without communicating that we were going to do it, we both started twirling around each other in concentric circles, drifting and weaving with the sort of coordination we associate more often with birds than with humans. We danced together in the wind. I've never done that with someone in a game before and it was beautiful.
The aim of Journey is an attempt at engendering empathy without overtly inserting it. Rather than rely on story to build empathy with a virtual character, Journey offers us the opportunity to empathize with the general human condition. In my mind, the experiment was a success. To those who are inspired by the game's delivery of this message, Journey will demand repeat playthroughs. Not because there are multiple paths up the mountain. Rather, it is because there is one path up the mountain and it is one that you know is shared by all who are journeying.
Not all art makes sense, but struggle does make sense. There is something innately human about struggle and that is what Journey taps into. In Mercerism, the journey goes on forever. At the top of the mountain, the traveler is cast down to the underworld and from there has to repeat his journey. To rise triumphant is to fall disgraced. That was the revelation of Mercerism. My revelation in Journey was this: that the journey of my life is as similar and unique as everyone else's.
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