by Dashiell Daniels
Journey, a videogame created by thatgamecompany, the makers of Flower and flOw, tells the tale of a red-robed being travelling across a vast open desert and ancient cities toward a towering mountain. Through its simple landscape and subtle lack of characterization, Journey offers its players an emotional and therapeutic experience by replicating life at its most fundamental levels, ultimately allowing people to assess their own being in the context of the choices they make.
You play Journey as a nameless protagonist making your way through a desert landscape filled with mystery and danger. Your goal is simple: to reach a brightly lit mountain in the distance. This goal is the first revelation of an aspect of yourself. What the mountain contains is never explained: it’s your choice, your decision as to what the mountain represents. The mountain could be Shangri-La, Heaven, Enlightenment; it could be an obstacle on your way or the next step down your path. You may or may not encounter other players as you go. With the intriguingly seamless multiplayer design, a comparison can be made between the design of the multiplayer and life — people come and go, unwarranted, unwanted, and completely random: you may or may not ever see these people again, but you share a moment, an experience of the journey, and it makes your experience all the better for it. Because of the generic character design, the only thing to distinguish you from others is your achievements, manifested in your cloak and your actions. This precarious choice in design makes the therapeutic aspect of Journey possible.
Because the only distinguishable aspect of either your character or another is your cloak and actions, the complete lack of characterization in the protagonist of Journey forces you to use your actions, and thus your subconscious, to distinguish yourself from others. The subconscious contains the underlying aspects of your personality; how you act, how you think, and why. Instead of using your imagination and fantasies to create a physical character, only your actions differentiate you from another. The player unknowingly projects his or her personality into their character ations and can see him or herself reflected, and thus can see him or herself as others see them, allowing the player to view who he or she really is rather than pretending to be some fantastical character or creature. The game, acting as a mirror, functions as a therapist.
Journey acts, for those willing to listen, as both therapist and patient. Journey creates an atmosphere that lets the player question his or her own actions and motives, an atmosphere that helps the player better understand him or herself. In therapy, the therapist creates a safe environment for the patient to express his or her emotions and actions without harming himself or herself, or other people. Journey, like therapy, allows you to act in a world without consequence, letting you see yourself and recognize – without real world consequences — how your actions affect others. Will that person who followed you and trusted you as a leader continue to do so after being led into danger by your naive, arrogant behavior, thus stripping this other person of his or her achievements and the sacred cloak? What will you then do, now that you’re left alone in the open desert, having left your companion in search of treasure, only to never see him or her again? Through careful analysis of how you act within the world, you are able to analyze, reconstruct, and either accept or change who you are.
Through these varying experiences with other people, no two sessions of the game will ever be the same, just like with real life. One only goes through life once; with that in mind, I will not play Journey again. I have had my time with the game and to play it again would be to redo my life within the game’s world. Without the innocent spontaneity that comes with that first experience, I would only be cheating myself out of a learning experience by playing again. Without that spontaneity, I would be instead much more self-conscious with my actions.In a second playthrough I would not learn anything about myself because I would most likely merely create a persona or mask and thus hide who I truly am. During a second journey through the game, I would play it merely as . . . a game.
Journey is beautiful. An astounding art style and emotionally heavy orchestration heighten the emotional intensity one feels when playing. These characteristics aside, Journey has done something very few games have made me do: through its beautiful and simplistic, yet brilliant, design, it has forced me to think about who I am, fundamentally, as a person. It has made me consider my actions in relation to others. I can only hope that the lessons I have learned on this short journey will aid me down the road on that long winding path called life.
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