This presentation was delivered on October 20, 2022 at the Transformative Play Initiative Seminar 2022: Role-playing, Culture, and Heritage.
Description:
Walking simulators are an odd videogame genre. Due to their lack of remarkable gameplay features, one may be inclined to ask if they even possess a genre at all. Exactly this unagitated “mechanical minimalism” (Keogh 2015, n.p.), however, encourages players to lose themselves in a subversive kind of digital, solitary role-playing game. They embrace an embodied, aesthetic relation with a virtual geography (Moralde 2014) and thus, the cultural connotations of its designers (Ash and Gallacher 2011). In my presentation, I discuss walking simulators as conveyors of extraordinary experiences (Duerden et al. 2018) via their ascetic provision of role-playing. I open by outlining the discourse on walking simulators in game studies as a renaissance of peripatetic research traditions (Rosa Carbo-Mascarell 2016), examine the benefits of walking simulators for the analysis of digital games, and elaborate on how they enable us to examine the co-dependency of walker and environment for a play with ambience (Zimmerman 2019) in virtual geographies. Supported by my understanding of videogame experiences as self/orchestrated, self/contemplated, and self/mediated (Schniz 2021) and the acknowledgement of the experience of walking in solitude as a highly cultured phenomenon (Wallace [1983] 2011), I am ultimately able to identify the act of aware, yet introspective walking in videogames as cultural experiences.
By way of illustration, I discuss the assumedly distinct British ambience of walking simulators by the developer studio The Chinese Room. Their games may be described as “self-conscious, and indeed self-consciously artistic […] about their representation of Britain” (Webber 2020) in their audio-visuality and, likewise, in their means of immersing players into their decidedly British settings. I conclude that they allow players to partake in a local ambience (ibid.) and can, therefore, provide a research outlook by questioning in how far a player’s embodiment of a literary archetype, the flâneur (Solnit 2001), within solitude of virtuality can be, in spite of its technical mediation, be equated to the ‘being there’ sensation of larping (Harviainen et al. 2018, 88).
Bio:
Dr Felix Schniz is the co-founder and programme director of the master’s programme Game Studies and Engineering at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English and American studies from the University of Mannheim, where he subsequently joined the master’s programme Cultural Transformations of the Modern Age: Literature and Media. After asking ‘What is a Videogame Experience?’ in his dissertation, his contemporary research focuses on the meaning of experience, peripatetic meaning-making, the genre theory of virtual worlds, and the subjective quality of the medium videogame.
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This seminar is hosted by the Transformative Play Initiative in the Games & Society Lab at the Department of Game Design, Uppsala University Campus Gotland. This seminar is made possible by financial support from the Sustainable Heritage Research Forum (SuHRF). The Transformative Play Initiative explores the use of analog role-playing games as vehicles for lasting personal and social change.
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Graphic Design by Liliia Chorna. Music by Elias Faltin. Video edited by Rezmo (Mohammad Mohammad Rezaie).