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• 1 2026-09-03T16:47:52+00:00 Chapter 5: Gone Home? Walking Simulators and the Importance of Slow Gaming 4 Aaron Reed, John Murray, and Anastasia Salter (Adventure Games, Playing the Outsider, 2020) plain 2026-09-29T17:37:35+00:00

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  If we lived forever, maybe we’d have time to understand things. But as it is, I think the best we can do is try to open our eyes, and appreciate how strange and brief all of this is.
  (What Remains of Edith Finch 2017)

  
  In classic adventure games, you spend a lot of time walking. The world would usually be divided into stage-sized screens which your avatar must move across, at walking pace, to reach an edge and the next linked area. These animations can seem painfully slow by today’s standards. Some games, including parts of Loom, would zoom out to sprawling vistas to make environments seem especially epic, your character reduced to a cluster of tiny pixels lost in immensity, the journey to the edge of the screen even more drawn out. Even in text games like Adventure or point-and-click games like Myst, where movement is instantaneous, players still spent much of their time navigating complex environments, retracing their steps to return to earlier areas looking for clues, unsure where to go next. Mainstream game design has moved toward minimizing these down times, adding mechanics like fast travel or quest markers to get players straight to the next point of interest, another filing away of the adventure game’s rough corners.
  
  While walking, as an act in and of itself rather than a means to a practical end, has long been demonized as an inefficient form of travel or a wasteful pursuit of the privileged, it has also been praised as an overlooked and unique part of the human experience. Thoreau’s famous essay “Walking” (1862) relates a story of the origin of the verb to saunter as a reference to idlers asking for charity “under pretense of going a la Sainte-Terre,” the
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  Holy Land (1) an essentially deceitful activity. But he goes on to make the “extreme statement” that walking for pleasure into new and unseen places is not an act of idleness but a necessary part of retaining our humanity in a modern world increasingly cut off from nature, pleading: “Give me a wilderness whose glance no civilization can endure.” Cultural scholars have often been drawn to Walter Benjamin’s portrait of the flâneur, the urban wanderer who walks without purpose other than keen observation through the city streets, and in whom “the joy of watching is triumphant” (1973): the connection between flâneurs and explorers of games has been noted by many games scholars (Kagen 2015; Carbo-Mascarell 2016). In games, walking connects to the adventure pillar of exploration, as well as the sense of immersive transportation and a focus on environmental storytelling: in adventure games specifically, it provides a space for thinking and reflecting, a necessary precursor to successfully overcoming obstacles. Walking “leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts,” writes Rebecca Solnit in her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking: “The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts… one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it” (2001). Every walk is a chance “to assimilate the new into the known,” the fundamental precursor to that new perspective on the world that adventure games strive to induce.
  
  The 2010s saw the rise of a new kind of game foregrounding exploration, often to the exclusion of all other mechanics. These games were originally dubbed “walking simulators” as an insult to exclude them and their creators from being considered “real games” or real game makers. But many creators of this othered, outsider genre have reclaimed the term, as have we in this chapter, for its embrace of qualities that would-be insiders despise. These games deemphasize traditional active game verbs to center more passive ones, especially movement, observation, and reflection. Different verbs can tell different kinds of stories, and these games have often told outsider stories about othered identities. They make us question our attitude toward rarely examined pillars of gaming like challenge, “fun,” and agency. Walking simulators distill one particular facet of adventure games to a purer,
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  minimalist form and have become in the process an essential site of tension for games, a space where their very definition has been contested: one that offers a radically different way of understanding and relating to characters and story than the genre’s other descendants.
  
  In this chapter we’ll trace the origins of the term “walking simulator” and the lineage of games that led to its modern form; consider their surprisingly diverse parents (adventure games and first-person shooters) and the sometimes unexpected ways they take after each; do a close read of how two foundational games in the genre, Gone Home (2013) and Dear Esther (2008), use its unique affordances, and close by considering where the genre is going and how it relates to other descendants of adventure games.

  Origins

  “Walking simulator” began as a derogatory label, and is still controversial among game creators: while some have reclaimed it as a useful category, to others it seems reductive or laden with too many negative associations. Some creators prefer terms like “first-person game,” “exploration game,” or “interactive narrative experience” (Kill Screen Staff 2016). Some have suggested creating a contrast with “first-person shooters” by coining the term “first-person walkers,” defining these as games in which “a player’s perception of the game world may be refocused to that of an investigator or close observer, via a strict adherence to minimal interactivity and slow, limited pacing” (Muscat 2016). We embrace the term “walking simulator,” however, for its connection to the outsider tradition of reclaiming slurs as proud labels; for its unambiguous association with a particular kind of game (compared to less-specific alternatives); but most importantly for the way it foregrounds what these games make visible: a certain pace of storytelling, driven by navigation through an environment and without the frustrating challenges of other styles of gaming (including their ancestor, the adventure game). But a discussion of these games should rightly begin with the hostile environment that birthed their label, so it is to that recent history we first turn.
  
  Outside of exercise games and human-computer interaction research, the term “walking simulator” first appeared applied to games as a derogatory dismissal, given to titles guilty of placing their points of interest too far apart. The open world survival mod DayZ (2012; mod for ARMA 2, 2009) and The
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  Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011) were both early targets of this phrase, despite being much more mechanically complex than games the label would later be applied to. The implication is generally that walking between enemies or quests is the boring part of these games. Designs that require too much walking are inherently flawed, as this line of thinking goes, let alone games that exclusively focus on it: among the earliest games to be called a walking simulator (in a comment to McWhertor 2009) was Walk It Out (2010), a game literally about walking simulated via the Nintendo Wii balance board. The comment, tellingly, includes all-caps and profanity: “WE’VE FINALLY REACHED IT!!! A FUCKING WALKING SIMULATOR?!?!?! *Jumps out the window*”. Thus a discourse was born.
  
  The term didn’t really take off and become weaponized, however, until the growing resentment of “outsiders” and indie games that would culminate in Gamergate, after which it was retroactively applied with vitriol to games released much earlier like Dear Esther (originally 2008) and To the Moon (2011) (Clark 2017). The critical success of Gone Home in 2013 came at a perfect time to inflame heightened tensions over “gamer” identity and game culture, a ready-made counterexample for a community looking to police what games should be and suspicious of critics who disagreed with them. This fight became so intense that Clark’s 2017 survey of walking simulators called them “gaming’s most detested genre.” Walking simulators became the most visible examples of the tensions associated with indie gaming, which often involve limits to interactions and the removal of recognizable mechanisms of challenge and victory (Haggis 2016).
  
  To call something a “walking simulator” became not just a complaint about pacing but an existential fight for survival, spiraling to include larger and larger questions of who gets to be a gamer and what should be “counted” as a game (Chess and Shaw 2015). Real games are difficult, goes this argument: you can die in them; you can take “real” actions (i.e., shooting and loot collecting, not walking or investigating). Real game heroes are powerful and effective. An ugly corollary to this argument, advanced by some, was that “real games” shouldn’t be about the disenfranchised. Game stories shouldn’t be about women or queer people—like Dear Esther, like Gone Home, like many of the games the genre would eventually include—nor should such people be included among their creators. For those impacted by Gamergate, the early snobbish reaction to walking simulators looks like foreshadowing of the more aggressive rejections (and subsequent consequences) to come.
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  This is despite the obvious reality that walking simulators were not a sudden invention of SJWs (2) rather, they continue an evolution of many long-running ideas in game design stretching back decades. Adventure games, as mentioned earlier, often featured a lot of walking between locations and a focus on immersion over challenge. Myst is sometimes derided today as a walking simulator in an attempt to other it, despite its historic and ongoing successes.3 The most visible difference between adventure games and walking sims is the removal of puzzles, although this evolution has happened across many genres of game, as radically extending play time through mental frustration fell out of fashion (to be replaced, of course, by grinding, cooldown timers, and other more modern mechanisms of inflating playtimes).
  
  An emphasis on immersion is a more immediate touchstone between adventure games and walking sims. Games in both styles tend to share an “empty” UI “with minimal distractions to obstruct the player’s view of the game world, or direct their movement or action” (Muscat 2016, 8). A popular Skyrim mod (with millions of downloads) is “Immersive HUD,” which hides on-screen UI elements when not immediately useful, leaving the window into the game world as unadulterated as possible. This sense of being transported into a beautiful alternate world is clearly a sensation desired by many gamers and a key part of the appeal of both adventure games and walking sims.
  
  Another technique for extending exploration-based play time is to procedurally generate some or all of the explorable world. Players complaining about the travel times in Skyrim might want to try the original Elder Scrolls sequel, Daggerfall (1996), with a world map thousands of times larger and mostly procedurally generated, taking multiple real-world days to walk across (Plunkett 2016). Earlier games such as Elite (1984) famously generated entirely procedural galaxies to explore. Graeme Mason traces the lineage of walking simulators back to two early procedural exploration games by indie coder Graham Relf, The Forest (1983) and Explorer (1986; Figure 5.1).
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  In a decade that saw its fair share of innovation, mixed with rampant cloning and bandwagon-jumping… Relf came up with the idea of a purely explorative game, a procedurally-generated terrain and count-less locations to visit and search. Explorer had a suitably apt title but, despite its technological achievement, it was met with indifference in the gaming press of the time. (Mason 2016)

  These games have often had mixed reactions: a modern example is No Man’s Sky (2016), savaged by some gamers upon release but remaining wildly popular with others—as of this writing, three years after its release, it attracted millions of players in the wake of its fifth major expansion. Where procedural games differ from walking simulators is in their lack of curation: they let you walk wherever you want, including perhaps into uninteresting places, rather than down a well-prepared path that tells a particular story.
  
  Another noteworthy antecedent of walking sims are “slow games,” a loose collection of largely indie games that eschew traditional notions of challenge or adrenalin-fueled pacing. Ian Bogost’s 2010 collection A Slow Year contains four “game poems” for the Atari 2600 that radically
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  challenge traditional expectations of gaming: games about sipping coffee while looking out a window or about taking a nap. Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn, the duo behind indie studio Tale of Tales, released nearly a dozen narrative games throughout the 2000s and the early 2010s defying gamer expectations: in The Graveyard (2008) the player controls an elderly woman walking slowly through a graveyard to sit on a bench, and The Path (2009), with its focus on exploring a forest filled with narrative vignettes, was another early game to receive the derogatory “walking simulator” label. Jason Rohrer’s 2007 Passage has the player walking a metaphorical path representing a life; likewise in the 2009 art game Every day the same dream by Paolo Pedercini, the player repeatedly retraces the steps of an office drone’s daily routine, able to break the cycle only by moving in the wrong direction. In many of these games, walking is the only mechanic, the sole way the player can interact with the fictional world. If adventure games gave walking simulators their focus on exploration and immersion, and generated worlds a contrarian design to react against (pushing away from randomness toward curation), slow games created a foundation or context for games to be minimalist and contemplative and connected to a lineage of art that explores these aesthetics.
  
  Walking simulators are among the most visible indie successes, with most of the games mentioned above receiving critical acclaim, awards, and attention in the gaming press. The reaction against them by gatekeepers is telling for what it reveals about the things they exclude. These games, for instance, provide no benefit to experienced players over novices. Mastery over the control scheme gives no advantage as it does in many other kinds of games. The subculture of “speedrunning,” demonstrating mastery over controls at its highest levels, is mostly inimical to the walking simulator: while technically possible to speedrun a walking sim, such demonstrations provide no real value for practitioners or viewers and are rarely seen. Simply put, you cannot become better than someone else at a walking simulator, and this lack of a mechanism for dividing elite from noob might be what’s really behind some critiques complaining about the lack of gameplay. To recall our earlier discussion, Shira Chess’s Player Two reminds us there are other kinds of players than those who enjoy mastery through long cycles of repetition, and how players drawn to narrative games in particular often have less time available to devote to any single gameplay experience. The pick-up-and-put-down, interval-friendly style of casual and mobile games lends itself to the type of play that fits in a busy schedule (Chess 2017). The many walking simulators designed to be completed in an hour or two, the same length of
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  time as watching a movie or reading a few chapters of a book, connect to these players in a different way than traditional games connect with Player One. Many of the critiques of walking simulators conflate this lack of challenge with lack of agency:

  Their stories lack any player agency; they simply make you trudge from destination to destination to pick up nuggets of story… A “Lets Play” of many of these games is superior because at least you get ad-ditional commentary for a greater chance of entertainment, and you save the wear and tear on your keyboard and the frustration when the poor level design gets you lost. You can experience whatever narrative that has been put in place without spending a penny.
  
  … So here we have it; the walking simulator. A genre no one really likes except their creators, pretentious peers, and a handful of games journalists. Yet this has only produced a tiny number of mildly suc-cessful games. But people still bitch and moan when the term gets applied to their work, or work they personally enjoy. (Sweeney 2015)

  These are familiar refrains, repeated countless times despite various counterfactualities (about lack of fans or success; about narratives not being worth money). In response to the criticism, defenders of the genre have pointed out that the qualities the term “walking simulator” emphasizes call attention to the underlying assumptions that frequently undermine the discourse of games. One critic finds the term:

  a glib label for story-focused first-person games in which one explores an environment with only limited interactivity. It’s a snooty, dispar-aging term that makes sense only if you start from the assumption that video games are supposed to contain complex mechanics and test the player’s timing, hand-eye coordination, and ability to master a  controller’s worth of commands (often with violent ends). Otherwise, it sounds as silly as describing an engrossing novel as a “page-turning simulator.” (Lindbergh 2017)

  This comparison with novels is also familiar and well-rooted in the discourse of the genre. Rosa Carbo-Mascarell suggests that walking simulators build on “the Romantic tradition of walking as an aesthetic practice” (2016), which in itself is inherently at odds with the expected aesthetics—the “hardcore”
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  norms—of ludic experiences. She calls Dear Esther, which involves a devastating roadside accident, a fundamentally Romantic game “in the way it doesn’t try to simulate an accurate representation of the systems of a car crash but rather concentrates on the way the narrator experiences its repercussions.” Walking sims often center interiority in a way that more mainstream genres struggle with, perhaps another reason the mainstream finds them off-putting or threatening.

  First-Person Walkers, First-Person Shooters

  Adventure games produced through the fallow decade of the 2000s struggled to find a place in a shifted landscape, and many reacted by doubling down on a slower pace and more contemplative story. Titles like The Longest Journey (1999) and Syberia (2002) featured extended playtimes and an even greater focus on lush worlds to explore and interesting characters to meet. In Syberia, for instance, you play a woman named Kate (with the telling surname Walker) in a largely character-driven story about a declining family of toymakers, with contemporary reviewers appreciating the game’s unhurried aesthetic: “The story unfolds at a decidedly slow pace. It takes its time and doesn’t rush… There are already plenty of games that require you to constantly run, shoot, fly, drive, or otherwise interact incessantly. It’s nice to be able to stop and smell the virtual roses once in a while” (Gmiterko 2002).
  
  But the dominant genre during this period was the much more frenetic first-person shooter. With many shooter engines increasingly providing tools to build your own levels or otherwise modify game content, it’s no surprise that many gamemakers began using these tools for other purposes. Many of the earliest walking simulators (including Dear Esther, The Stanley Parable, and Mary Flanagan’s 2003 [domestic]) were originally mods for first-person shooters, and the first-person perspective has come to define the genre.4 A premade engine means many problems of rendering a journey through a visually complex environment have already been solved, providing a pathway for indie and outsider creators to create games at the higher levels of visual fidelity that had come to be expected. Since these
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  games inevitably inherit some of the technical and visual aesthetics of their more violent predecessors, first-person shooters provide another thread of ancestry useful to understanding the walking simulator.
  
  Games journalist Keith Stuart characterizes the way walking sims evolved from shooter games as a shifting of focus from extroversion to introversion:

  First-person shooters like Doom and Unreal revolutionised our  understanding  of space, structure and embodiment in games. They put players into the body of a killing machine and set them lose [sic]. First-person walking sims have taken the environmental lessons, the same ideas of architectural structure as a form of storytelling, and diverted the focus from action to introversion. They leave the player alone in a world with their own thoughts. (2016)

  J. P. LeBreton maintains an archive of shooters that can be glitched or modded to remove the enemies (2017), creating a kind of tourist mode where one can experience, for example, “a Quake that’s retooled to be nice to potter about. Quake as a whole is incoherent and largely brown… but it does have some interesting places and architecture” (O’Connor 2017). The Quake mod also changes the music, replacing the sharp-edged original soundtrack from Trent Reznor with tracks from one of his more “chilled-out” albums. The change in music is another important move to eliminate the game’s tension and replace it with a thoroughly different mind-set. Notably, many of the examples LeBreton catalogues are unauthorized and require modifying, with various levels of difficulty, the original game files. The 2015 game SOMA (among a small handful of others) does offer an official “Safe Mode” as a built-in feature—but notably, this was originally named “Wuss Mode: Monsters Won’t Attack.” These modes are the opposite of their hypermasculine counterparts, the “Nightmare” or “Hardcore” modes that emphasize the hostility of the environment by ramping up the likelihood of death, and the victory reserved for players skilled enough to survive them.
  
  Stripping the violence from a first-person shooter, however, often results in a strange interstitial kind of experience, something in-between and unrecognizable. O’Connor’s review of the tourism Quake mod highlights some of the unsuitability of these environments to casual exploration. The architecture of these games in their original form is a means to the end of success in combat: to the extent the player notices it at all, it is while looking for places to hide, physical obstacles, routes for evasion or ambush. Details are designed to be glanced at briefly, not lingered over. Game
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  scholar Andrew Hutchison compares the technical affordances of the engines behind Doom and Myst, released the same year, in this light (2008). Myst’s images were largely static because it required offline rendering to create worlds beautiful enough to hold up to long scrutiny, while small bits of spot movement were added via Quicktime video to award attentiveness, creating interesting environmental details such as lapping waves or flittering butterflies. Doom’s engine, by contrast, creates lower-fidelity images in constant motion: the player will look at any one thing for only moments, while constantly racing through the environment fighting enemies who are also in constant motion. In Myst, the water moves because the focus of the engine is on detail. In Doom, the water is static because the focus of the engine is on action.
  
  If a player is meant to focus on action, and movement into a new area can only signal a coming attack or a new place to hide, the world will inherently have different aesthetics than one designed without these concerns, focused on exploration at a much slower pace. There is nothing slow about Quake when played as intended. This is why most walking sims that descend from first-person shooters have been radical reimaginings taking years to produce, not merely removing enemies but crafting whole new environments, often with custom textures, objects, music, and narration: creating not just a new focus of interaction but an entirely different kind of world to support that focus.
  
  What kind of exploration, then, do the worlds of walking simulators support? Contrary to expectations, these games are rarely just about exploration. There are a few exceptions: Proteus (2013) is a joyful exploration of a shifting island purely for its own sake, and experimental games like Césure and Lumiere (both 2013) place the player in explorable abstracted spaces of light, color, and shadow (Reed 2013). But the most famous and successful walking simulators are best understood as explorations not of environment, but of character. Just as the environments in first-person shooters exist to support action-packed combat, the environments in most walking sims are designed to be platforms for understanding and empathizing with characters. In games like Dear Esther, Virginia (2016), What Remains of Edith Finch (2017), and many others, 3D game worlds come to be understood as metaphorical spaces offering windows into the minds and stories of the people within them. Sometimes this is made literal as part of the game’s fiction (as in the 2014 games Mind: Path to Thalamus and Ether One, both about entering an environmental representation of another character’s mind) but more commonly we understand this reification as
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  working in the same way experimental films signify abstract meanings with concrete visuals, or the reality-bending conventions of magical realism or unreliable narrators creating layers of truth in literature.
  
  In Virginia, for example, the player takes the role of an FBI agent assigned by internal affairs to investigate her partner.5 In the early game a number of recurring locations are established, which the player frequently moves through: the top-floor and basement offices of the protagonist’s boss and partner, the stage where she received her FBI badge upon graduation, and a diner in the small town where she investigates a missing person case, among others. As the story progresses, however, these locations become imbued with symbolic meaning for the protagonist’s inner struggles and conflicts. The long walk to her partner’s basement office becomes imbued with the dread of impending betrayal, and the flashbacks to the stage symbolic of her drive for success and what she’s willing to sacrifice to achieve it. In a game without spoken dialogue, these locations become a language for conveying meaning, and the player’s journey one of uncovering, step by literal step, the self of the character whose story is being told. This revelation of an at-first obscured character, not a quantitative ranking, score, or survival time, is what is “won” through play.
  
  As in adventure games, players of walking simulators strive to recreate the “ideal walkthrough,” the preexisting story that must be uncovered step by step through the player’s actions. But in these games, the next step is not occluded by puzzles: rather, it’s generally made so obvious it’s impossible to miss. The combination of increased immersion but decreased challenge—players no longer must “think like” the protagonist by deducing themselves how to advance the story—risks hampering games’ particular strengths at engendering identification with the player character. In third-person adventure games, with the avatar a strongly characterized on-screen presence, the ludic experience can feel almost directorial, with the player as puppeteer. Some walking simulators with strongly characterized protagonists ask the players to enact small routine actions, such as shaving (in the 2012 game Unmanned) or putting on lipstick (in Virginia), to restore this sense of direct control and identification. However, another approach is to center stories around a character other than the one controlled by the player, as in Gone
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  Home or Edith Finch. In these stories, the player’s reduced agency meshes with a role closer to voyeur or watcher than active participant.
  
  The role of violence in walking simulators is also more complex than is generally appreciated. The immediacy of the first-person perspective is, of course, part of the appeal of shooter games and also the source of much of the critique around them: compare walking simulator with “murder simulator,” a phrase often evoked in the discourse around controversial titles like Active Shooter (Horton 2018). The first-person perspective also evokes the survival horror genre, a set of preexisting expectations around danger that games like Gone Home lean into. However, neither walking simulators nor adventure games are divorced from violence; rather, they shift it into different registers and modes of interaction.
  
  Classic adventure games displayed a noteworthy ambivalence about violence, despite their reputation as more passive and bloodless endeavors. In Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (1992), for instance, a more violence-oriented path was among several optional strategies the player could pursue, an approach echoed by Sierra’s Quest For Glory titles among others. Many classic adventures included reflex-driven minigames, such as a sequence dodging the thrown daggers of an assailant in Manhunter: New York (1988); Telltale games (examined in Chapter 3) sometimes also include reflex-based sequences. Often these emphasize a time-limited choice to engage in violence, even when that choice proves a false one (as is especially common where more violent characters like Batman are concerned).
  
  In walking simulators, violence is also often present, but generally at a distance, remembered or stylized: the violence of Gone Home, for instance, is the emotional abuse of a family; in Esther a traumatic car crash is rendered as a surreally beautiful underwater tableau; and in Virginia a queer character’s loss of her job, subsequent illness and death are seen only through dry official reports and the remnants of at-home nursing care, hidden behind half-closed doors. Making a character a direct participant in violence would seem to violate the generally permeable boundaries of the walking simulator label, just as would punishing less competent players with death.
  
  Death also has an ambivalent history in adventure games. Classics were divided in their approach to it, with LucasArts generally avoiding it while Sierra became notorious for serving up dramatic deaths around every corner and misstep off a precarious ledge. Reviewer Drummond Doroski, however, has noted that these divisions weren’t as cut-and-dried as we remember them, with games from both studios breaking their own rules: Fate of Atlantis, while largely death-free, still gives you several chances to
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  die at key moments (Doroski 2009). Death in adventure games may have been at first an unthinking “style transfer” of the frequent deaths in early arcade games: to be considered a game, such thinking goes, clearly the player must be able to die (although even this chronology is complicated: Adventure features frequent death for the unwary and predates all but the earliest arcade games).
  
  We’ve discussed previously how the use of difficulty and the division of players into winners and losers is deeply embedded into mainstream gaming spaces and genres, an inviolable part of the definition of games for many. The most common distillation of this notion into purest form is the mechanic of permadeath, where dying is not a temporary setback but a permanent erasure of all progress, requiring the player to start over from the beginning. Here the division of players into winners and losers stretches to exclude almost all who play from the first category, allowing only the truly elite (or those privileged with the most free time) to claim victory; and it is no surprise that this environment can foster toxicity and exclusion.
  
  In walking sims we can see this purism taken to the opposite extreme: removing all possibility for any player to be judged superior to another by removing any punishment for differing performance of play. Games scholar Bonnie Ruberg has called this notion “permalife,” for games which not only include but center the notion of making death impossible (2017). She notes that permalife games are often made by queer designers, positing that “permanent living represents a particularly potent trope for expressing both hopes and concerns about contemporary queer life in the face of an uncertain future.” But Ruberg resists the reading of this mechanic as purely utopian:

  In contrast to the neo-liberal, homonormative narrative of LGBTQ lives and histories “getting better,” permalife suggests alternative mod-els for queer ways of living that persist in time: loops, endless flat lines, a constant entanglement with death (which, in these games, is always intimately entwined with life)… It also challenges us to look for the consequences of living in video games as well as the consequences of dying, to think about existing and not just surviving as difficult, and to identify places where life and not death is what gives video games meaning.

  The theme of continuing to exist in the face of trauma, pain, and death is common to many walking sims in their explorations of grief, identity,
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  and meaning. In The Fidelio Incident (2017) the player’s character is slowly revealed to be struggling with long-repressed guilt from his participation in an IRA bombing decades earlier. The hostile spaces he moves through after a plane crash in a remote icy landscape become a gauntlet not just of physical survival but of metaphorical endurance: the struggle of living with a crushing regret. Permalife games are difficult in an entirely different way than games requiring skill or strategy, requiring players to enact the motions of continuing existence, even in the face of survival under (or complicity with) the evils of that existence. “Perhaps the walking sim’s greatest power is how it makes players recognize and consider such decisions and the way they influence gaming outcomes and environments. A number of traditional big-budget titles don’t demand this kind of moral engagement, which makes sense—asking a player to stop and consider the horrible things they’re doing is antithetical to moving forward” (Clark 2017). Slowness is forefronted in a game of permalife: adrenaline is neither the goal nor the appeal.
  
  Most walking sims also streamline away the often-misleading promises of agency that other story-heavy games promise: very few feature significant branching pathways or different endings. In 1997, game scholar Espen Aarseth wrote that the limitations of play persist even as the production values of games increase: “It is a paradox that, despite the lavish and quite expensive graphics of these productions, the player’s creative options are still as primitive as they were in 1976.” We would argue that, another twenty years later, this is as true as it was then, but also as false: creative options of play as expressed through narrative games have been continually evolving through imitation and experimentation but ultimately have always exceeded that which can be graphically expressed. While the walking simulator is the least textually reliant of the adventure game descendants chronicled in this volume, it is still ultimately dependent upon the fusion of an expansive graphic space with other narrative approaches to building the player’s sense of investment. This might not always consist of “options” in the sense Aarseth implied but is no less meaningful, and in some cases more instrumental to the telling of unexpected, othered narratives, and characters without the privilege of having choices to make.

  Gone Home

  As we’ve discussed, walking simulators are noteworthy not only for their focus on immersive exploration and reaction against competitive models of
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  gaming but for frequently centering stories and characters about traditionally marginalized voices. The Fulbright Company’s breakthrough indie hit Gone Home (2013) is an early and prominent example of the genre, inviting the player to literally piece together the identity of the central character from fragments of environmental storytelling. Taking the role of an older sister returning home from college, the player uncovers the story of Samantha, a teenager whose romantic relationship with another girl causes further fractures in an already damaged family. Sam’s story is revealed through letters, notes, music, and other minutia of daily living, which the player combs through: not only Sam’s, but other people in her life. The game asks the player to confront prejudice without any ability via in-game mechanics to resolve it.
  
  Coming to an understanding of a character or environment as a means of gaining control over it is a central tenet of environmental storytelling generally and walking simulators in particular. This kind of understanding connects more to cinematic than ludic traditions, although designer Thomas Grip has noted that ensuring players reach that understanding is more critical in a game than a film:

  [P]art of what makes games interesting is the expression of will. To achieve this, the player must know what they are able to do within the game’s universe. In a movie, a character can reach for an object not seen before, or exclaim “I saw that shop on my way over!” despite the viewers never seeing it. This is not possible in a game. In order for a player to know a game’s space, both in spatial terms and in terms of what actions are possible to make, they need to get intimate with it. The player has to go through the boring process of walking about in order to make a mental picture of the surroundings. If they don’t, they cannot possibly know what the realm of their possibilities are. (2017)

  Designer Steve Gaynor describes the experience of interaction in Gone Home (and the studio’s next game, Tacoma) as ultimately about this kind of intimate perception and the impact of the game back on the player:

  in a game like Gone Home or Tacoma, the world is inert until you have an effect on it. The fact that you are opening a cabinet and picking up an object and rotating it isn’t important to the game world… What’s important is that through affecting the game world, you’re creating
  (p. 131)
  your understanding of it. Through changing the game world, you are changing your consciousness of what it contains and what it means. There isn’t a lot of, “Walk through a door, hit a trigger, and watch this thing happen.” Everything that changes your perception of what the game means is through you interacting with what’s there and having an effect on the state of the world that in turn affects you. (qtd. in Suel-lentrop 2017)

  In the same interview, Gaynor notes the influence of Chris Ware’s Building Stories (2012) and immersive theater production Sleep No More (first staged in 2009) on his work. Stories is an oversized box of jumbled volumes of comic art (in sizes ranging from tiny pamphlets to full-sized newspapers), telling through various perspectives and styles the stories of a handful of people living in the same four-story building. The influence of this work on Gone Home can be seen in the similar fragmentation of stories into disparate parts that must be pieced together, making similar demands on the reader/player to construct identities and narratives out of competing (and even conflicting) perspectives. In Sleep No More, audience members can choose which characters to follow during a theatrical performance unfolding simultaneously in multiple rooms of an expansive location: while they cannot interact or change the unfolding events, they can choose how to move through the space and where to focus their attention. In both pieces, the readers or viewers are given agency to understand and gain perspective on the story through their interpretive decisions: about which threads are most interesting to follow, and about how to piece together the events they witness into a meaningful whole.
  
  Gone Home also plays with player agency by subverting expectations about danger and complicity. The first moments of the game create a sense of mystery more frequently associated with survival horror: the abandoned house is cast as unnatural and threatening, with the player invited to explore it suspiciously, suspecting some external danger behind the apparent disappearance of the family. That danger, of course, turns out to be internal, not external. The player becomes the intruder in what should be a familiar environment by virtue of returning after long absence, seeing the intimate lives of her family with fresh eyes. The player’s initial fear that they might need to act quickly to defend themselves from some lurking supernatural horror becomes transmuted, by the end of the story, into the inevitable realization that their character has already lost her chance to act,
  (p.131)
  has arrived too late to intervene in her sister’s story. All she can do now is understand it.
  
  Critics have drawn different conclusions about the role of Gone Home as (and alongside other) queer media. Zachary Harvat describes it as part of the tradition of “queer historical play,” which does not deny the challenges and trauma of queer history but also does not place it as the sole narrative emphasis (2018). Pavlounis describes the inherent conflict between the potential of a radical queer archive of personal experiences and memories, and the more normative experience of solving a mystery (or Mystery) that descends from the earlier games it evokes, criticizing the game for how “it ultimately undermines this potential by adhering to design conventions grounded in normative and normalizing logics” (2016): we will explore the notion of inherently queer game mechanics more in the next chapter. Veale describes how Gone Home toys with expectations of nostalgia, emphasizing a near-historical setting for memories while critiquing that same time’s association with, as Veale puts it, “a backdrop that is even less welcoming to difference than today” (2016). Veale also argues that the game draws on the concept of museums and exhibitions, shaping an experience of the setting through elements rarely presented in games:

  Exploring the house is the same thing as exploring the story,  because the narrative is architectural, both because the story is distributed throughout its structure, and because different areas have been per-sonalized by different people living there: the house exists as a core-sample of one year in the life of your family. It is filled with the same detritus we expect from every-day lives, yet which is barely ever included in game worlds, such as shopping receipts, toilet paper, a kitchen complete with fridge and cupboards, and even bathrooms complete with towels and tampons.

  Other critics have described the game as “literary realism,” emphasizing the “interestingly ordinary” setting and love story (Suellentrop 2013), or been more critical of its reliance on media references and consumer memory through a hypersimulation of bad taste and extremes, noting how Gone Home and similar games “provide a simulation of cultural memory that blurs historical reality with period modes of representation” (Sloan 2015). Brendan Keogh described Dear Esther and Gone Home’s pleasure as “textual and phenomenological,” noting that user rejection of them is in part due to their rejection of “dominant hacker technicity” alongside explicit critique
  (p. 133)
  of “the masculinist dominance of the commercial videogame industry” (Keogh 2016, 210).
  The text of Gone Home is explicit in this defiance of an imposed patriarchal value system, which the player explores at a distance through the memories found in the house. One of the first of Sam’s diary entries to acknowledge the challenges of her parents’ views is dated April 5, 1995:

  Katie, you know how mom and dad are. Not exactly… super open-minded. About things. It feels like every minute I don’t spend with Lonnie, I spend worrying about them finding out about us. And what would happen if they did … You know dad’s “joke” about “the nun-nery” that he’d tell whenever you brought boys around the old house? I wonder where he’d want to send ME…

  This type of detail adds to the sense of cultural distance, while also providing a certain timelessness to the experience of growing up queer in a hostile environment. The final lines also evoke the specter of conversion camps, more prevalent in the US of the 1990s than they are today.
  
  The final answer to the mystery of Sam’s disappearance lies in an entry dated June 6, 1995 and titled “I Said Yes,” where in a final letter to her sister Sam describes her departure and reunion with her partner. As a resolution to the mystery it is bittersweet, in part because it happens outside the player’s control; because there is no reunion between the player character and her sister; and perhaps because the player might bring a more jaded, suspicious viewpoint to the likely outcomes of running away with a young lover. The game’s final ending affirms the reasons for the departure, and can be interpreted broadly given the context and potential consequences of the decision to run away:

  Katie … I’m so sorry.
  That I can’t be there to see you in person.
  That I can’t tell you all this myself.
  But I hope, as you read this journal, and you think back, that you’ll understand why I had to do what I did.
  And that you won’t be sad and you won’t hate me, and you’ll just know …
   that I am where I need to be.
  I love you so much, Katie. I’ll see you again. Someday.

  (p.134)
  Sam’s words, though addressed to Katie, are also aimed at the player, serving  as an invitation to connect and respect Sam’s choice. The request not to “hate me” is particularly poignant, given that the essential absence goes unfixed. There is no further opportunity for either confrontation or affirmation: the player cannot reach out, or in any way repair or bridge the family’s disconnections.
  
  While the game attracts attention for its centering of a queer narrative, the distance of the avatar from that narrative invites critique:

  there’s a fundamental passivity to the game that contradicts this praise, particularly where the queer-centered narrative is concerned. This conceit becomes particularly painful as it is clear the player in-habits a sibling of a woman whose coming out story caused a family schism: the player is not a participant in the queer romance that has been heralded as one of the central parts of the narrative and is instead an outsider, so distanced that the sister’s romance is a complete sur-prise. This distanced gaze continually invites the player to observe the queer romance through a lens of judgement, watching the impact of the romance on the family. (Salter, Blodgett, and Sullivan 2018)

  Unlike the queer games discussed in Chapter 6, which center queer characters and narratives, Gone Home keeps the player at a distance. But the slow pace and fragmented narrative invites a level of self-reflection distinctive to the walking simulator’s approach to character and story.

  Works Cited

  (see original text on pdf)