Is There Something Orientalist About Wonder?

This is meant to be a moment to consider Journey’s relationship to Orientalism, not as a critique of the game, but as an analysis of how mood in Journey is constructed through Eastern influenced architecture and environments (by Eastern, I am actually not being vague. Middle-Eastern, Near-Eastern, Far-Eastern, North African, Turkish, and Russian architecture all are mixed in here. Not just Arabesque architecture, but going as far as Shinto arches). I’d like to access that discussion by also discussing another game, Monument Valley (2014), which is clearly influenced by Journey. They share several qualities: silent cloaked protagonists, minimal control mechanics, an unsteady orientation (pun certainly intended), a pseudo-religious plotline regarding mass death, Eastern-influenced architecture and environments, and a driving sense of wonder. By wonder, I mean specifically the unexplainable feeling of beauty, awe, or excitement at something unfamiliar, inexplicable, or ineffable.

In Monument Valley, parallel, reflected, or otherwise tangled spires, onion domes, arches, and runic wall art compose the impossible architecture of this game. Monument Valley aestheticizes MC Escher’s impossible stairwells through Arabesque and Eastern Slavic architectural tropes, creating the famous puzzles of the game. As your silent protagonist wanders through these levels, a sense of wonder (for the player) comes from the ineffable feeling of watching stairways that connect in unforeseen ways, of acting out the gentle manipulation of unfamiliar built environments, set on lightly colored backdrops with no additional context.

In Journey, the desert takes center stage as an ecosystem. Its unique physics becomes integral to the first act of the game, its (seeming) endlessness inspires or frustrates the player by never purely directing the direction to move in, and the ruined building half-buried in it are the skeleton of the first “levels” of the game. As a player begins to find direction in the confusing new world of Journey, these platforms rising from the otherwise neutral desert mark the first bricks in a path towards the end of the game. If I had more of a background in architecture, of which I have virtually zero, I could hone a bit more in on the patterns in the gratings on the first silk bridge that we walk across, the arches and window patterns that dominate these environments.

When we orient ourselves in both Journey and Monument Valley, when we ask ourselves “OK, where am I? What do I do? How do things react to me? Can I be hurt” and test those questions out, we do so in Orientalized ecosystems. This is not a finger-wag at these games, but instead it’s an attempt to say: perhaps some of the way that these games induce wonder in us is by having us wander within defamiliarized Eastern contexts and spaces. Perhaps central to the mechanic of orientation within these worlds and the unverbalizable feeling of feeling in these games is its basis in the Orientalist tradition.

We could take this in several directions. We could argue, using Said, that an intellectualizing of Journey and Monument Valley is exactly the work Orientalism is predicated upon, where the flattening of the East’s culturally specific forms into vague masses intellectualized upon by Western scholarship is to deeply affirm Western identity by opposing or contrasting (orienting in opposition to) the Orient. That is one option. We could also write Journey and Monument Valley in line with a tradition of “finding one’s self” by localizing oneself in a new context (an Orientalist tradition in many ways). We could, perhaps more kindly, simply identify Journey and Monument Valley’s affective registers as utilizing Orientalist iconography. Or we could counter all of these readings! I am interested in all of these, but my gambit here is to begin to answer a question that I think Journey will call on all of us to answer. Not “what is this feeling?” but “why am I feeling this feeling?” or “how is this feeling designed?”