Walking Simulators: The Digitisation of an Aesthetic Practice

Abstract

Walking has been a long standing source of literary and artistic inspiration for writers (Poe 1840; Wordsworth 1979; Sinclair 2003) political activists (Chtcheglov 1953; Garrett 2013) and artists (Breton 1960; Aragon 1999). The videogames landscape has seen a surge in walking inspired games controversially tagged as ‘walking simulators’. This paper is a literary reading into three such tagged games: Year Walk, Gone Home and Dear Esther. It frames these games as continuations of the Romantic tradition of walking as an aesthetic practice thus embracing walking simulators as an art, the like of Romantic paintings and literature. Using the psychogeographic dérive, it interprets these ludic experiences as an artistic and aesthetic expression with an emphasis on authentic emotion, subjective in play and design. Through the walk, the landscape of the games become tied to the practice of literary psychogeography following a lineage including Charles Dickets (2010), G. K. Chesterton (1905), Andre Breton (1960), Ian Sinclair (2003) and Will Self (2015). It concludes that there might be an appropriateness in using the term ‘walking’ in defining these games. The Romantic tradition was born out of walking and it is evolving into a digitisation of its practice.