Inspired by Professor Jagoda's article, I spent some time playing Journey over the break, and I want to reflect a bit on my experience with the network affordances of the game. We talked briefly about it in class, but for those of you who aren't familiar with the game: released by thegamecompany in 2012 for PS3, Journey is a game in which the player navigates through vast and unbelievably aesthetic terrains as a cloaked avatar, although the exact nature of their journey is never explained beyond evocative images shown in cutscenes. The mechanics of the game are minimal, but one of its most unique features is how the player may be randomly connected with another “companion” player, allowing their avatars to journey together. However, inter-player communication is highly limited: aside from movement, the predominant method of communication is emitting a chirp, which may be “small” or “big” depending on how long you hold the “O” button. This limited lexicon might seem absurdly rudimentary, but I think it allows for a form of communication beyond the way we normally converse: a playful, highly emotive, and significantly indefinite language that involves a unique conception of both player and companion.
In my own playthrough, my first companion popped into existence shortly after entering into the second area, emitting a long series of short chirps when they noticed me. I could imagine whoever that other player was mashing the “O” button repeatedly, and I did the same. As we continued onward, one of us would occasionally emit a chirp or two, and the other would always respond back, mimicking the pattern of the first. This “dialogue” wasn't meant to communicate anything useful to progressing in the game (such as directing the other of where to go). Rather, it felt like we were just playfully reveling in each other's company: there was a kind of satisfaction in chirping a certain way and seeing my companion respond in kind: it was a sign they understood me, wanted to relate to me the same way I wanted to relate to them, even while remaining ultimately incomprehensible. It was the shape of a conversation without words, filled instead by a kind of nonverbal mutual good will. Even though the “signs” of our language far outnumbered the meanings we might seek to convey in different contexts, it always seemed possible to imbue them with a potent if imprecise affect: when my companion patiently taught me how to glide upwards in a specific way, my repeated chirps were meant to express profound gratitude. Later, after I waited for my companion to catch up to me when navigating a more difficult area, my chirps were meant to convey happiness at their success and at our reunion. There is something forgiving about this plasticity, but even so, this multiplicity of meaning, in addition to lacking the means to check my companion’s understanding, rendered our shared language fundamentally indefinite and generated an unbridgeable distance between us despite our companionship.
Yet, intuitively, I think there is something significant and even necessary about the indeterminacy of our shared language, and Professor Jagoda's discussion of the game suggests why: in one passage, he explains how Journey manifests the kind of “stranger sociability” described by Michael Warner, in which the stranger becomes integrated into the social sphere, and how, in this way, Journey affords players an experience of strangerhood that blurs with intimacy.[1] Not only my companion but the also language we shared had this quality of strange intimacy, a mixture of familiarity and foreignness.[2] I think this opens up a more direct and potent experience of the affects more comprehensible forms of communication only gesture towards. There is a sense in which, through my avatar, I fluently spoke a language I didn't entirely understand: thus, the relationality of Journey not only renders the stranger familiar (without reducing their strangeness) but also oneself strange. This could be compared to the the liminality involved in learning a foreign language: in earlier stages, you often cannot be absolutely sure what is being said or even what you are saying, relying instead on a more ambiguous and uncertain mental “sketch” of what is being communicated; in doing so, you begin to discover not only a familiarity in the strangeness of this foreign language, but also a new conception of yourself in the context of that language. In Journey, however, this liminality is never extinguished by “mastery” of the language, rendering this form of relationality and conception of the self ends unto themselves.[3] In this way, I think the “affective dimensions of computer networks,” that Journey foregrounds may not only involve new ways of relating to strangerhood but also a new kind relational (or ambient) self: the kind of self that exists not separate from but rather enmeshed within a network of other selves, both familiar and strange.[4]
For those of you who have also played the game, I'm curious as to what forms of communication you developed with your companions, as I think it varies for every pair of players.
[1] Patrick Jagoda, "Chapter 4: Participatory Aesthetics: Network Games," in Network Aesthetics (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 176.
[2] Another player whose story Professor Jagoda discusses articulates a similar experience. See Ibid., 172.
[3] Ibid. 176-177. I think this observation about language closely aligns with Professor Jagoda’s discussion of “uncertain and nonsovereign” encounters in the context of Journey.
[4] Ibid., 171.