Surely there’s a better name for games like Gone Home than “walking simulator”
Walk It Out
This week, Clayton Purdom gave us a review of Tacoma, the new game from developers of Gone Home. It’s very much an evolution of the style that Gone Home helped architect and many games since have shared. For whatever reason, a lot of people out there get really pissed off that these narrative-focused, conflict-free games exist, and such irrationally angry detractors started derisively calling these games “walking simulators.” The term got so widespread that it’s become something of a reclamation project for fans. Clayton made use of it in passing, kickstarting a conversation about the label down in the comments and a search for a more accurate, less loaded term. SpaceCop summed up the issues:
I really dislike the term “walking simulator.” Maybe it is the best term to describe this brand of first-person adventure game, but it feels laden with condescension. You don’t call FPSes “shooting simulators” or turn-based RPGs “queuing simulators,” but this genre—whose most famous example, non-coincidentally, highlights LGBTQ characters and relationships— gets reduced to “Well, all it does is simulate going for a walk. You can do that anywhere, it’s lazy, it’s pretentious, and why can’t those SJWs keep their politics out of our games and give me a gun!”
I see mostly assholes call them “walking simulators” is what I mean.
Venerable Monk dug deeper into why the label started seeing use as an insult:
I’m sure we’ve had this conversation before. I tend to dislike terms like walking simulator because they’re often used derisively to indicate what the speaker perceives as missing from the game. Rather than trying to come up with some other name that more accurately describes what you do in such a game, the topic that’s more compelling to me is what exactly makes these games work for the people that love them.
I think what some folks are getting at when they employ walking simulator as a category is that it’s a game largely without mechanical challenge. Meaning your mastery of a controller or mouse and keyboard is never tested in such games. You’re not really expected to think strategically or solve difficult spatial or logic puzzles. But I’ve definitely talked with folks about challenges that have nothing to do with the typical metrics of game mastery. Like Yumzux said elsewhere in the thread, you can’t exactly measure someone’s connection of loose narrative clues and award them an achievement for contextual awareness.
There’s also no way to measure how well someone identifies with a character or how strongly they feel about a conflict. I’d say games like Gone Home endeavor to help you challenge your assumptions about people that are unlike yourself. It’s something we’ve been doing for centuries with all other kinds of media, and I honestly don’t know whether people threw a fit in the early days of writing when a book challenged them to think about others in a new way, rather than offering an exciting adventure or a mystery to solve. My guess is some did. I doubt many people burned books because they wanted the protagonist to marry someone else at the end.