"Walking simulator" is quite a strange term. It started as a somewhat degratory name for games that are low on player ability with interact with the world, then it became an earnest term. The gaming world collectively forgot what "adventure game" meant. Video games that were primarily about going to one place to another, reading a lot of text, just enjoying the scenery without much interaction, and video games that were low on or completely bereft of player violence are very old, much older than today's action games like shooters, swing-your-sword-arounds or fighting games. Weirder is people applying such applying standards to define video games in the first place, erasing decades of culture in the name of unironically embracing the caricatures of video games in TV shows written by out of touch boomers.
Video games are a new medium, but games in general? They are quite old, perhaps goes back the time when humans got bored for the first time. There is chess for example, a couple of thousand-year old is chess. It's played to win, but it was also a way to make people engage with war without actually being in a war. We can see it in names of chess pieces in Turkish: Elephant, castle, horse, vizier, shah, peon. It's closer to original conception.
We can also look at childhood games. Some of them have a goal of winning but not many of them are. Playing toys for example, is not done for any particular goal in mind. However something like a toy car is a way to engage with the experience of living a real one. Dolls, playing house etc. similarly simulate aspects of life. When I played with toys, my favourite thing to do was to give each of them -- whether they were toy car, toy soldier or toy lego piece -- a personality and make them go through a story, often ripping off the plots of cartoons I watched. They would live in a town for example, elect mayors or kings, have drama and comedy and there would be recurrent villains attacking the town.
Another type of game is playing in sandboxes. As in, actual ones, like in the playgrounds. You sit there to make a sand castle, but that's not a concrete goal, it's a pretext for throwing sand around and watch it slide through your hands. You get a similar rush in destroying sand castles, or playing play-dough, the creation is secondary, you just want get that discharging feeling.
Nights on the Woods, In Fact, Is a Video Game
In the past, I have written about how art is about abstractions, and games are art because they do the same thing, and here we in fact see non-video games fundamentally exist to achieve the same thing. Challenges, competition or concrete goals are all catalysts for achieving a certain feeling. Yet, people often feel they are what makes them a video game. Perhaps that's their best answer to the lingering question: what makes a video game different among other arts? What makes something a video game, but not an animated movie, or what separates a text heavy game from an illustrated book or a comic? Games so often free-form borrow so much from other mediums, this question is worth thinking about rather than say, difference between picture and animation.The easy answer is: "Video games are interactive", but I am not writing this much to just say that. The more interesting question is what is interactivity? The buzzwords like "walking simulator", "cinematic experience" or "interactive movie" are basically proposed answers to this question and all of them are wrong in different degrees.
Playing Night in the Woods make me think about his in particular, because, well, you do walk in the game a lot. However, why this game seem to be called a walking simulator but a myriad of open world games, or even platformer games would not? Well in a lot of those games, you shoot or hit things. So, this logic follows that if you could randomly fight people in NITW that would make it a more "game-like", despite it having nothing to do anything the game wants to accomplish. Violence in games is so popular because they are a very convenient way to show impact and change. Easy to show cool effects, easy to achieve that feeling of kicking sand castles. But seeing violence as fundamental to video games seriously misses what interactivity is.
The irony here unlike a lot of games, walking is actually an essential part of the game. If we merely shifted from place to place like in a visual novel the game would have lost a lot, the game would not be able to hit the feeling of spending days aimlessly in the small town as a college dropout. When Mae's movement slows down at towards the end, you feel the mood very every step, the slowdown feels much drastic after you pressed the same two buttons the whole game. Even a small thing like this is a unique way a video game can convey feeling.
Similarly, NITW does not have any lose-states. None of mini games throughout the game punish the player for losing. The game reacts to the state of failure differently: Your skill at rhythm the game becomes Mae's skill at playing guitar. Conversely, if seeing credits itself isn't a win state, there are none in the game. Because thematically there also aren't any. Sure Mae and her friends survived, their friendships got strengthened, and they got rid of the cult but all the problems in their lives are same: Mae has an untreated mental illness and unemployed, Bae is in a prison of crushing responsibilities, Gregg can't look after well himself and Angus has to worry about him, and none of them can escape the black-hole of capitalism and the wounds of pasts will continue to haunt them. However, they are still together, that means the band can go on. Win states are just another tool to convey feelings and not using tools are just as part of design as using them.
Most games don't have true, permanent states -- the ones that makes you start the entire game -- since mid 1990s. You are merely thrown back to the newest save point, your progress is not cancelled but merely halted. There are also a lot of games where you are expected to fail eventually like Faster than Light, or rouge-like games where the player character becomes stronger with each death. Here, "the fail state" is just a marker for the next iteration, a new chapter, or a new adventure. Conversely, many games do not have true win states. They may have a lot of small-scale win and lose states but for most games but as a whole the goal is seeing the end credits. And honestly, being challenging is not even the domain of video games, a movie, for example can challenge one's senses or worldview to change, just as a game can challenge you adjust your reflexes or tactics. When challenge viewed as a way of recreation, these two fundamentally don't look that different.
Of course, just with NITW example alone, we can easily see the whole premise as ridiculous as actually is. However, it's important to look at what's the philosophy behind this view. It is a particular blend of nerd nostalgia and toxic masculinity, feeling much in the spirit of Gamergate? This makes sense especially given the game that got the most visible reactionary backslash: Gone Home. It was game made by women, about women, and didn't have any concrete sign to make the game "masculine". People would not hate the game less if it had random platforming sections, these ridiculous standards are not actually relevant for no one. It is always about the reveration of challenge for the sake of challenge, yearning for days of the "games with real difficulty", endlessly complaining that games nowadays are "too easy". All of these are old as the nerd culture itself, and have been always myopic. The game that set the standards of much of 2D console gaming, the niche game called Super Mario Bros, was quite gentle with its difficulty curve, and most well-remembered games, even the more difficult ones pulled the players by myriad of their qualities. Developers have, unsurprisingly, always wanted "the casuals" to play their games, that's why cheat codes, console commands, easy difficulty options have been always there. And today is quite prosperous for challenging games; from quirky niche titles to Dark Souls inspired AAA games. All in all, "games exist to challenge" is a fake outrage for chasing away the wrong people from exclusive club for real men.
But it's sad to admit that this mentality have affected game design. It can be seen in quick-time events, ironically a thing the reactionary crowd was also complaining about. QTEs deserve a comprehensive look for their own, but for now it's sufficient to say they are often used in places where they are not necessary. Often, a part of the game that just would be just fine as a cutscene gets a QTE section just to make it more "game-like", it does not achieve proper interactivity but also break the pacing of the cutscenes, and can even feel like a chore on a section where you could relax your hands from controlling the game for a few seconds.
What Is A Game?
Releasing yourself from controlling the game and game controlling you, a controllable idle state, is actually a fundamental part of gaming. Games either include a built-in pausing function, usually by bringing up a menu, or the game can just stop in the absence of player input, like a text adventure or turn based game waiting for commands. Or in general, any moment that player can stop a certain repetition can be idleness. Compare that to movies, they can be paused too, but they are not meant to be. It always feels a bit off, especially when they give long ad breaks on TV. They are called motion picture for a reason, you are expected to see them on motion, they build your attention for watching things move, otherwise they are just frames. (This is why analyzing movies with narrowly focusing on frame-by-frame mistakes is bad.) Watching a movie is passive, not idle, you are controlled. Video games aren't often frozen still when they are idle, sometimes there is an idle animation, a music in background, ambient voices, a clock moving, or input line flashing. A key difference in visual novels and regular novels is the former waits for your input before moving after each paragraph, theoretically novels can have a lot of visuals in them as well. NITW plays with this idea: At the beginning of the day, you can watch Mae sleep forever, it is up to you when to interrupt. It's a small touch that depicts how annoying waking up can be quite well.When you are not idle, you repeat things in video games. Repetition on micro scale; repetition of input, movement, animation, AI behavior patterns, music beats. Repetition on macro scale; repetition of goals, tactics, level structure. In Tetris, you can rotate the blocks around, when they line up the line will be cleared and there is new a new block falling after one reaches the ground. In NITW, each time you enter a place, the music changes. You can hop on trash cans indefinitely. For most of the game, a cycle of the day will be same: We start Mae calmly sleeping, she wakes up, changes her clothes, goes downstairs, talks to her mom, walks around town, goes through an evening event, comes back home, sleeping back, seeing a dream. Later events feel so impactful in part because this cycle breaks down, just has Mae's life slips away from her hand. Repetition is also a narrative theme for lots of characters, such as the banal hardships in Rae's life. Repetition can occur in other media obviously but in a video game, it can happen for the sake of itself.
On very basic terms, imagine a wheel or disk spinning. Watching it spin is not a game. But if you can stop the wheel, turn it when you want then it's a game, now watching is the feedback. Watching someone spinning the wheel is not a game, it's a Let's Play. If we tried to capture the feeling by visual transmitters, now that's a video game. Obviously, we are assuming here this act is done as recreation, not labor.
You can think this as akin to physics. In space, when the net force affecting you is zero will stand still indefinitely. If the force is not zeros you, you will move indefinitely But if you can apply a force to yourself so that net force is zero again, you will stop, this is controllable idleness. If you can apply forces to start moving and stop at will, you can repeat yourself freely, as long as you can generate kinetic energy.
Repetition for repetition sake and controllable idleness, two fundamental pillars of any video game, always looming. In Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, when at his castle, Ulfric Stormcloak makes a great speech about serving people and heroism, with scripted moves where he and his right-hand walks around the castle. But this isn't a cutscene, so you can walk over the table, throw plates around, stand in front of Ulfric to block his path and so on. You can interrupt him with dialogue but he will continue after finishing talking to you. What's more, this speech will be repeated anytime you enter the castle. Skyrim's dedication to make the player aways feel in the world is admirable but honestly this is one of the places where a cutscene would be better. Because it has the stiffness of a cutscene without the strengths of controlling the camera. You can't control it but it will happen forever. It has the repetition without the controllable idleness.
This is what players mean when "a game feels repetitive". Repetitive without an idle state. The radiant quests in Skyrim are perfect examples. They will indefinitely repeat themselves. They are aggressively in your face about the repetition, there are no small idle states as breathers during cutscenes. You can't ever cancel them or go away from your quest log. They are indefinitely will be with you, you don't have to mind attention to them, but they will be there, always. Even something small like quest log can make players idleness being taken away from them. Idleness is control. Video games are roughly about repeating things without feeling like repeating things, so players will be convinced they control and change things.
The opposite, idleness without repetition is older among arts. Drawings, sculptures are passively there, while you can just focus on or ignore any part of the work. Music, animation, and literature all try to control the senses into focusing into a direction. A drawing or photograph focuses on a frame before any viewer engagement. But a video game does both, often at the same time. In a turn-based battle system, you are shown the state of a particular turn, there might be idle animation and background music to give you a particular mood but the frame of the state itself is much like a drawing before you issue any command, after command you become passive for a few seconds, animations and sound ensue, numbers fly, then a new state, a new frame emerges. You are now active because you are granted idleness. Consider loading screens, the picture alone allows idleness, but the fact you have to wait makes it forced. Functionally they are not different from cutscenes, hence they are sometimes used to hide loading.
My point here is less about create a classification and more about find out what we expect and receive from media, why cutscenes and other not-strictly game parts feel so different. That way we can understand where cutscenes can be actually good and where they should be avoided. And we can truly explore what interactivity is. Consider how creative Doki Doki Literature Club is, where outside of the game window also becomes a part of the game, how the very files of the game is part of gameplay loop. Interactivity is not just making thing moves in the screen or deciding where story should lead, it's any where the player becomes part of the media.
You are watching a movie -- works with the books also -- and in the middle of it, the movie halts and you are expected to answer some questions, otherwise you won't be allowed to see the rest of the movie On false answer you are sent back and asked to watch the movie again. Now, can the program that facilitates this be considered a video game? Movie part or answering a question may not be games separately, but they create a loop of "watching movie + answering a question" together, which can potentially occur more than once. Watching the part of movie upon failure can be also can be considered repetition. But, just watching the movie more than once is not a repetition I care for, it's a loop outside of the work, so it doesn't connect to a meaningful idle state., but in our system it does. In my eyes, this is sufficient to make our system a game. Now consider if our systems allowed us to give false answers indefinitely and just kept us on an answer screen. Now, we have entering inputs as a smaller loop and "answer + movie" sequence as a larger loop. Perhaps the smaller loops can be also considered a game, a game within a game. What if instead of answering a question, we are expected to beat a more conventional game; a puzzle, a board game, a platforming level? What if these games narratively connected to each other and the movie shown? Well, we got a game just like an important portion of the games we play today!
What does this show us? There is a mentality that cutscenes and gameplay parts are wholly disconnected from each other. "You watch the movies, play the game" so it is said. As we explored before, this is an understandable feeling, cutscenes neither have repetition nor idleness, they feel completely different from game parts. However, how removed they might feel, they are still connected to the overall game. So, it's important to make them feel seamless and reduce overhead of transitions between cutscenes and gameplay. As glorious Final Fantasy 8's cutscenes are, they feel so tonally disconnected from rest of the game. Persona 3 is interesting here, because it's weird art style meshes well with 3D graphics of the game. There is also narrative problems; cutscenes and the controllable world should not feel distant, games have been trying to tackle these issue to varying degrees of success, but unfortunately for development large-budget games, the goals of writers and the goals of game designers often don't align. This is what makes me a game series like Uncharted appealing to me; there is a light year difference between its cool set pieces, high quality cinematics and its unimpressive shooter play.
The other thing I learn is, the term "interactive movie" doesn't really tell much either. This might feel like pedantry -- which is not that different from entirety of this article -- but when you choose paths for story, execute quick-time events or walk your character to certain points of interest, you are not interacting with movies, you interact with simple games which built on a lot of small movies. A better word for them can be "low-interaction games". "Interactive movie" brings different expectations to me.
Let's close with a word on NITW: Imagine, if Mae walked for you to everywhere, dialogue and examining objects happened moved on without your prompt, what would happen? It would stop being a game. The writing and nice art style would make it a decent work, but would it really be able to give the slow town feeling as the game does? No, video games are uniquely good at making you live feelings. This is the main reason why movie adaptations of video games don't fare well; they take away why games offer but don't replace it with anything movies do well. Hopefully, big budget games will realise they don't have to follow movies to achieve narrative excellence, they are usually better when they don't.
All screenshots are mine.
This article is written thanks to my dearest Patrons and special thanks to: Acelin, Alexandra Morgan, Laura Watson, MasterofCubes, Makkovar, Otakundead and Spencer Gill.
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