Did you cry at any point while playing Journey?
If so, you’re not alone. Upon the game’s release, I noticed several testimonials cross my Twitter feed of people who claimed to be moved to tears by Thatgamecompany’s latest project. But why? The game has gorgeous stylised artwork. Then again, so did Wind Waker. And as sublimely fun as Nintendo’s cel-shaded Zelda may be, it doesn’t put a lump in your throat. The music Austin Wintory composed for Journey is elegiac and stirring, but so are many of the themes on the Skyrim soundtrack, and the idea of a player blubbering while traipsing about Whiterun is crazy talk.
I have a theory to explain why some players cried during Journey, and it hinges on one of the interactions in the game that reviewers have consistently written off as one of the game’s sideline features.
The jumping is where Journey breaks your heart. The jumping is why many players cried, even if they couldn’t pinpoint the reason. The jumping is the tiny, insignificant-looking wingnut holding Journey together, without which it would collapse into a heap of exquisitely airbrushed scrap metal. It’s not Thatgamecompany’s token nod to classic video-game interactions, settled on after staring blankly at an empty white board for two hours, unable to come up with anything more engaging to have players do. It’s not just a tool for poking around its stunning vistas and drinking in the sights.
Some in the gaming intelligentsia have decried Journey for being stubbornly linear, for staging a parade of set-pieces that simply puts an art-house spin on the filmic template favoured by Uncharted or Call of Duty. But Journey had to be a game, if only for this one reason. You have to press the X button for yourself and feel what it’s like for your robed avatar to leave the desert floor and drift back down like a fallen leaf surfing a breeze. To play Journey is to feel the most incredible lightness, as if you’re a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade balloon being prepped for show time. Thatgamecompany aspires to move players via the act of movement itself.
I used to always see the lure of video games in terms of an escapist fantasy hinging on a geographical expedition. Just like a book or a movie, video games transport us to faraway places that most of us couldn’t feasibly access in real life. But the potency of video game’s escape isn’t summed up in that destination, it’s how you’re empowered to move through that space.
GRAVITY CRUSH
Our real-world bodies are dense with fat, sinew and muscle. Gravity pins us down no less gingerly than André the Giant once flattened his poor opponents to the wrestling mat. When we step inside an avatar, the game doesn’t just hand us a new suit of clothes, it hands us a new sense of physical weight, which the game’s developer has license to assign. Journey’s pilgrim is covered in cloth robes, but it’s hard to imagine there being any flesh beneath that tunic. She’s too light. The only weight she carries appears to be the weight of the fabric in which her spirit is wrapped. To play Journey is to feel like a soul freed of its body.
Is it any wonder critics have hailed Journey as a religious experience? Jenova Chen and his colleagues at Thatgamecompany aim for transcendence and they do so by taking the word itself at face value. To transcend is simply to move upward, which is exactly what happens in Journey every time you mash down that X button. Of course, even though your return journey to earth is light as a feather, it remains both an emotional and altitudinal letdown. Journey teases you repeatedly with the feeling that you should be able to fly. You’re buoyant enough, surely. Collecting hidden glyphs elongates your magical scarf, letting you stay aloft a second or two longer.
It’s easy to look at Journey as a physical journey to a big bad scary mountain – a Pixar-styled riff on Frodo’s trek to Mordor. But the mountain is simply a metaphor for elevation. The experience Thatgamecompany offers players is not primarily about a horizontal journey but rather a vertical one, climbing and jumping gradually higher and higher until you wriggle free of gravity altogether, as you do in Journey’s rapturous closing sequence.
Journey is a religious experience because rapture itself is a fundamentally metaphysical concept. It’s that escapist fantasy of finally being able to tell gravity to suck it. This is why, in Christian iconography, angels are depicted as having wings sprouting from their shoulder blades. To possess wings is to have recourse against gravity. At the end of days, many Christians expect to physically levitate into the sky to be with Jesus. Even the biblical story of Jesus coaxing Peter out of the boat to walk on water involved him showing that he could help humankind defy gravity, if they simply mustered sufficient faith.
Even secular representations of the afterlife echo this primal aspiration. Ghosts are frequently depicted as hovering off the ground, fluffy and weightless as clouds. When people chase transcendence through chemical means, they refer to the sensation as ‘getting high’. When they feel good, they describe the experience using expressions such as ‘being on cloud nine’ or ‘walking on air’. People tend to think of our culture’s dieting obsession in terms of people trying to look thinner, but you could just as easily see it as a human’s quest to soften the force of gravity.
Heaven is popularly depicted as being in the clouds because it must be reached through ascension, whereas Hell exists in the molten core of the earth because that’s simply the final stop on gravity’s train line. It can’t pull you any deeper. The sardonic twist of naming BioShock’s host city Rapture was that the game made you climb into a bathysphere and plunge down, down, down to the ocean floor to reach it. Likewise, the phrase “fall of Rapture” may be gaming’s single most inspired oxymoron.
But Irrational’s mind games don’t end there. Submersion imparts weightlessness. Schools of fish swim by outside Rapture’s windows like flocks of birds soaring through the air. Yet you’re forced to watch their movement from behind glass, pinned to the floor inside where gravity still holds sway. It’s no coincidence that BioShock’s most pitiable character is the Big Daddy, whose flesh and organs are grafted to such cumbersome armour, he’d sink like an anchor in open water where a normal person would naturally float upward.
FLOAT ON
Journey’s desert may well have been the ocean floor in some prehistoric epoch, but it’s long since dried out. Now it’s just confused. Small strips of fabric swim about in the air in tight formation, having vacated the remains of a ruined war machine like a school of clown fish emerging from a coral reef. Other fabric creatures take the shape of manta rays, jellyfish and, later in the game, even mighty whale sharks. Sand cascades steadily over rocks in one area like a jungle waterfall. Everything is designed to provide a tangible sense of water and buoyancy. The closest most humans have come to feeling weightless is the act of swimming. Journey references water and the ocean to evoke this sense memory while teasing us with the fantasy of experiencing the same sensation without the crutch of water. Like Dumbo realising he can fly without that feather clenched in his trunk.
The modern science-fiction genre and the 1950s preoccupation with humanity colonising outer space are fuelled by the same fantasy – to be rid of gravity, to finally achieve weightlessness. This is why every ‘80s kid fixated on Back to the Future II’s hover skateboard. This is why all vehicles in science-fiction hover, from The Jetsons’ family car to young Anakin’s pod racer. In fact, the bulkier the spaceship that we see hovering, the cooler it looks. Final Fantasy’s airships are captivating because the fiction of those tiny propellers holding such a mighty vessel aloft implies a similarly magical subversion of gravity. Kids don’t dream of being astronauts in hopes of conducting tests on mice aboard cramped space stations; they just want to bounce around on the moon. Since most kids never get to realise this fantasy, we give them trampolines and inflatable Moonwalks at birthday parties to soften the blow. Oh, and we give them video games.
The most satisfying jumping in games always has a sort of moonwalking levity to it. I’m not sure I’ve ever enjoyed jumping more than in Crackdown, having collected enough green orbs to max out my agent’s agility skill. Each time I jumped, I felt like Superman vaulting buildings in a single bound. Though not as extreme, Halo’s jump has that same kind of arcing lilt. Flattening out the buoyancy of a jump, as Epic did in Gears of War, is one of the most efficient way to darken a game’s atmosphere and heighten gravitas - in a literal sense, by amplifying gravity. Even the racing genre’s spectrum in tone boils down to developers’ decisions about if, and to what extent, airtime factors into the experience.
Science has proven that the actions of our physical body have a direct impact on our emotional state. Test subjects who were tricked into arranging their facial muscles in the shape of a smile were more prone to claim to like whatever object they were being asked their opinion of. In the same way, a game that effectively imparts a sense of physically lifting off the ground will engender in the player a sympathetic emotional response of uplift and inspiration. Journey’s leap has a frolicking grace to it. Not only do you lift into the air, but your character will occasionally even twirl playfully like a sea otter before drifting gently back to earth.
Super Mario Bros. 2 let you select between four characters, each of which was defined by its relationship to gravity. Even though Mario is the series’ hero, I could never bring myself to play as him or Toad, who both had fairly unremarkable jumps. Luigi had a ridiculously high Crackdown-style leap and Peach could defy gravity by hovering for several seconds if you held down the A button. Virtual jumping feels so good that it only took a modest stat-building incentive to get us bunny-hopping all over Oblivion’s Tamriel, just as it only took the promise of a slight competitive advantage to get players doing it compulsively in Call of Duty multiplayer. Jumping affects the emotional tenor of gameplay in the same way an unexpected key change does a pop song.
SKYWARD SOAR
If weightlessness is such a heady fantasy, then, why does Journey feel more euphoric than its predecessor Flower? After all, that game let players maintain a persistent state of weightlessness, inhabiting a cloud of flower petals that hover perpetually in the breeze. Isn’t flying supposed to be the most pleasurable dream a sleeping person can enjoy? If Flower feels less satisfying, it’s because it lacks a sense of contrast. The joy of weightlessness is felt in that moment of leaving the ground, the moment where you feel gravity’s tether loosen. You still need a hint of gravity to remind you what you’re escaping. This is why the grappling hook is such an enjoyable item to wield. And the jetpack also.
We don’t want to KO gravity; we simply want to punch it in the face repeatedly. No wonder the platforming genre has proven so durable over the years. Before Mario was called Mario, he was simply Jumpman, a name that spoke to his purity of purpose. The final mountain trudge in Journey stifles our ability to jump so that when we finally do quit struggling with gravity, the sensation feels even more dramatic. We’ve had just enough time to forget how remarkable it feels. Journey’s moving depiction of death and ascension is the closest games have come to communicating the physical sensation of one of religion’s most tantalising promises. Rapture.
Though games are uniquely equipped to provide the physical sensation of weightlessness, creative works in other forms of media have moved viewers by strumming the same chord. If there’s any film renowned for being a classic Hollywood tearjerker, it’s The Shawshank Redemption. Frank Darabont’s film about a man unjustly accused and sent to prison is also, not coincidentally, about defying gravity.
The famously unsubtle metaphor of Shawshank’s elderly inmate Brooks setting his pet raven free just before being discharged from prison speaks to this idea. But far more emotionally powerful is the scene in which Andy Dufresne hijacks the prison intercom and spins a 45 of Mozart’s “Sual'aria, Che soave zeffiretto" from the Marriage of Figaro as the inmates stand around in the yard staring blissfully into space. The two duetting voices effortlessly soar and dance, carrying the inmates’ spirits high above the prison walls just as the fabric manta ray in Journey balances the pilgrim on its lip and unexpectedly buoys her up to the platform she’s unable to reach on her own accord.
The image of the prison yard ball-and-chain implied by Shawshank is that film’s version of the cast-iron diving bell anchoring the Big Daddy to the ocean floor in BioShock. Dufresne’s hope of escaping Shawshank offers a metaphorical picture of a person itching to kick loose his shackles and foil gravity’s tyrannical tug.
Shawshank saves its hardest-working metaphor for its final scene, in which Morgan Freeman’s character Red finally reunites with his pal Dufresne, who’s been refurbishing an old boat on a sandy beach down in Mexico. The vast glittering expanse of ocean represents freedom, of course – the polar opposite of Dufresne’s claustrophobic stint in solitary – but the boat is key here because it symbolises buoyancy.
If we cry, it’s because of the beauty of that picture of those two former inmates escaping gravity and preparing to float weightless on water, but the picture of companionship sharpens our emotional response. Just as there were two voices rising and dancing in Mozart’s operatic duet, we’re moved at the sight of Red and Dufresne achieving their weightlessness in concert. Thatgamecompany deepens our emotional response in a similar way by weaving co-op partners into the Journey experience. We don’t need to communicate with those anonymous players. They help us jump higher, and that simple fact bonds us together.
When I was a music critic in a former life, the most effusive round of album reviews I can recall were the ones that surfaced after Sigur Rós’s ( ) album came out. It was uncannily similar, in fact, to the gaming press’s response to Journey. Critics went farming their thesauruses for the most florid adjectives you could imagine. Some talked openly of weeping while listening to the album. Reviews waxed poetic about the glaciers and valleys and lakes of the band’s native Iceland.
When I reflect on those reviews now – and I’m sure I contributed my own lip-quivering paean to the heap – it’s clear that the record tapped into the same primal wish that Thatgamecompany’s Journey does. The choir-boy elasticity of singer Jónsi Birgisson's tenor allows his voice to occasionally, almost without warning, slide into the upper atmosphere with a falsetto so exquisitely effortless, it ties your throat into a pretzel. He never simply lands on those high notes. He always catches a note in the lower octave and uses it as a catapult to launch into the upper one.
Do yourself a favour and listen to the opening four and a half minutes of the Sigur Rós track “Festival” in which Birgisson’s voice repeatedly shuffles off gravity for sport. The volume swells of organ-like synth form a kind of liquid through which his voice swims ever upward. We listen in hushed, moist-eyed wonder, like rusty anchors on the ocean floor dreaming of suddenly bobbing like corks to the surface. We listen to the sound of rapture. The sound of a pilgrim climbing a mountain and forgetting to stop his ascent upon claiming the summit.
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[This essay was originally published on the Edge magazine website, but has since become unavailable.]