On Slow Travel
We often praise media for evoking ‘a sense of place’— for giving us some insight into what a particular city or town or patch of wilderness is like. Games are able to provide us with an experience of a place that other media cannot. This unique type of experience allows us to acquire a unique type of knowledge. And here I’d like to reflect on just why that is and the ways designers can focus in on this.
So how do we come to know a place? I mean really know it ‘like the back of your hand’. Seems like a fair bet that there is no better way to make you feel like you thoroughly understand a place than to actually make your way through its spaces. Not once, but over and over again —with many purposes and diverse routes—carving paths all through the place. Think of the way you come to know your way around a campus or a downtown or the bit of woods near your house when you were a kid . And think of the way you the roads around where you live and work.
And why do we do all that? Typically, we have to get where we need to be to get or do the things we need to do. And all these trips here and there teach us, test us, and, once we start consistently getting it right, show that we know our way about.
Most of the things in our world are located at different physical distances from each other. And from us. To get to something you want or need, you have to wind your body through all those spaces. You have to internalize the relations between the things in the world and the places you frequent. And the things themselves—you can only use them, access them, benefit from them— when you get within hand’s reach and grasp them. To talk to someone—to really hear their words and voice and reply back without a meaningful delay— we had to be within earshot.
That is how things have always been for us in everyday life—-until somewhat recently— and that is what still feels natural. This is, by default, how we expect things to work. Even though we experience it all the time now, there’s something strange about doing something here and something happening a thousand miles away.
I’ve always remembered a passage that I found striking in Being and Time where Heidegger observes that technology often “de-distances” our world. The neologism sounds awkward, but the idea is intelligible. Some types of technology invert many of the natural spatial and pragmatic relationships we used to live by. It brings the far near— but it can also make the near seem far away or go unnoticed. A radio in the 1920’s might have carried the sounds of a metropolitan opera house into your living room. A telephone can bring a faraway friend close again. My television can allow me to spectate an event on the other side of the world, but, at the same time, it can make the room I am sitting in disappear. The internet can connect people from points spanning the globe in a single match of a game. This expands what is within our reach and is undeniably beneficial, but it also somehow disrupts the logic of our pre-theoretical everyday world. This sort of world without distances is somehow less intuitive. It is not the world we innately expect.
Whether or not any of this has much significance philosophically, it does seem to hit on something that is important in the creation of an artificial world like in a video game. When a video game positions itself as giving us not just a game, but a new world, maybe they should keep this in mind.
When the designer sits down and asks the question ‘How will the player get from point A to point B?’. They have a few options: navigating, ferrying, teleporting. They can make us make our own way from point A to point B— manually controlling our character’s movement through the space. That’s navigating. They can let us catch a ride from point to point—they can carry us away in a vehicle or on a mount or on a boat, which we do not control. That’s what I call ‘ferrying’—the player is not finding paths, they are hopping onto something else that already knows the way and so we can get to point B without knowing the way at all. But this can still be different from teleporting. When the player is ferried—we can still watch as we are carried through the world. We are in the back seat. So we see what’s outside the window, but don’t really come to know the path. You gain less knowledge, but there’s still an experience of the world around you. And that’s different from teleporting from point A to point B without really being anywhere in between. You hit a button and a brief animation occurs or the screen goes black and then you are in a new place. No experience or knowledge gained in the process—just the pure gratification of our desire to be somewhere else.
A designer can make us walk step by step through a world to get where we want to go and we feel that’s simply a fact about the world—some things are far apart from each other and that’s all there is to it. But by having us traverse the world in this more embodied way—yes a virtual body—, we come to have a much richer sense of that world, we come to know the ways the world hangs together. Or the designer can let us skip the slow going traversal and “fast travel” to exactly where we would like to go. And that saves us time, but it makes most of the world seem unnecessary, optional, superfluous. All that really matters then are the points of interest, the events in the world, the loot waiting for us in the places we teleport to. If you want the world to matter, don’t let us skip it.
The same probably goes for shopping, trading, inventory management, and all the things that you once had to do in a town or something like a hub. That’s the slow way: go to this place to do this thing you want to do—- because that’s the place it happens. Yes, it is always more convenient to let me do those things on the fly irrespective of my players physical location. But it is typically nonsensical and no attempt at any sort of diegetic explanation is made. These conveniences depend on so many deus ex machina which somehow bridge the menus and the game world. There’s also a kind of fast and slow socializing that is present in games. We can go somewhere to talk to someone or we can simply summon up a conversation with them at any point. Talking with another character is something that can feel strange when it seems like we are carrying around NPCs in our pocket as little convenient companions. It makes them less convincing as characters typically because it so painfully points out their true function to guide the player and even when they aren’t our guides— it just doesn’t seem like they have a lot going on. There’s little indication of independent agency. I mean how much time can you spend on standby following me around, just waiting for me to get an inclination to talk to you. (A separate issue is that players find these pocket NPC’s vaguely irritating due to other aspects of their design— namely the fact that they tend to interrupt the gameplay so often.)
Our time is limited so I understand the temptation to let us skip past the bare moments of traversal and back-tracking and going-to and fro. And yeah, I sometimes would like to skip these things—I will die one day after all. All I want to note is there will always be a trade-off: save my time, but lose a bit of the world. And in some games or virtual environments— it makes sense to make the trade. In others, it doesn’t.
This is often true of real life travel as well. I do not walk across the country when I go on a trip. But as travel speeds up, the surroundings fade away. Travel can make the environment we pass through become more and more low-res until it is almost abstract. When I walk somewhere— I cannot help but notice the environments around me. Same for biking or driving a car— but the environments become a bit more blurred and fuzzy. I still see them and live by them. I come to know their relationship to each other, the landmarks, the rough travel times from here to there, shortcuts that might make for a quicker route. And I still appreciate some of the textures around me. If I really want to see the country, I travel by car. We drive through the Appalachian mountains in the fall when the leaves turn, maybe ride out West one summer to see the desert places, or drive up the California coastline. The pace and the vantage allows us to take things in. And if I feel like I’m missing something, I pull over to admire the views, I stop here and there and get out of the car and explore a bit. When I travel by plane on a commercial airliner, the cabin becomes my focus. It is almost like a somewhat slow somewhat uncomfortable mode of teleportation. We start off in one city and wind up in another after spending a sufficient amount of time in a cylindrical metal object. The surroundings by and large are simply gone— except for the brief glimpses during takeoff and landing. The pilots still can attend to the surroundings and the world— but not us. And if the planes go fast enough, even pilots cannot immediately notice with their basic senses much of anything about the world they fly through. They rely on their instruments to mediate.
It is hard to nail down exactly what gets lost when we make travel too fast, when we introduce more and more de-distancing into our worlds. Here’s an attempt: the more ‘de-distancing’ a game has, the more abstract our interaction with its world becomes. Instead of living in and by the world and being forced to make use of your basic physical verbs and ‘body’ to do the things you want to do or get where you want to go, you begin to use more and more unintelligible magic buried in a menu or artificial command. If we make the way we get around and get things we want, grounded and physical and even a bit cumbersome, then the world starts to feel like it has weight. The slowness is in fact an opportunity to experience these places. And it’s the only way we come to know the world like the back of our hand.
But we still do fly places in real life. We like to travel fast sometimes. And that’s because often when we take a trip we care more about the place we are going to rather than the stuff in-between. And that could be a difference between an artificial world and our own. The stuff in-between should just be better. Why make a world full of spaces of little interest? Just to make the interesting things seem better by contrast? There is an argument for this I can imagine— swathes of emptiness dotting a landscape may somehow make it seem like a world on its own— not a strange artificial place built just for us. This fact alone might make the world more convincing— less “gamey” in the pejorative sense. Which might be just to say that real worlds are going to have their boring bits. And worlds that want to seem real should have boring bits as well. Maybe or maybe not.
But we cannot come to know a world deeply by skipping all the boring bits. And it is hard to believe that a world really fits together unless we know-how to make our way around it.
[More on all this later— would especially like to talk more about traversal systems in many different games and how the large and small differences between them shape different experiences of the game world.]