The Walking Simulator Was Always a Bad Name

Take the phrase apart and you can see the sneer being assembled.

“Simulator” arrives from a very specific joke. Around 2013 the word had been colonised by Surgeon Simulator and then Goat Simulator, which take the deadpan naming convention of Farming Simulator and Euro Truck and apply it to something absurd. Calling something a simulator, by 2013, meant: this has exactly one mechanic and the mechanic is beneath comment.

“Walking” supplies the mechanic. The accusation is that the game contains nothing you’d dignify with the word play, so the only honest label is a description of the locomotion.

It caught on because it’s funny and because it was aimed at a group of games some people were genuinely annoyed by, and eleven years later it’s the standard term, partly reclaimed, used without malice by people who like these games. It’s still wrong, and it’s wrong in a way that has actively confused a decade of design conversation, so I’d like to have a proper look at it.

It started as a research project

Dear Esther, 2008. Dan Pinchbeck made it as a Source engine mod while at the University of Portsmouth, and it was funded — this is the part people always blink at — as academic research, backed by a UK research council grant. The question was literally an experiment: what survives in a first-person game when you remove the shooting?

Not “wouldn’t it be nice if games were art”. A stated, funded, methodologically framed question about the medium’s load-bearing components, run by taking the gun out of a first-person shooter and observing what was left standing. The 2012 commercial version, with Robert Briscoe rebuilding the island’s art, is what most people played, and by then thechineseroom had turned a research artefact into a product that sold well enough to fund the studio.

So the founding work of the genre is a controlled experiment, and the genre got named after a joke about goats. There’s an entire essay about games criticism in that gap and I’ll spare you it.

Nobody names a genre after its legs

Here’s the structural objection, and it’s not a fussy one.

“First-person shooter” names the camera and the verb — two things that distinguish it from other games. “Real-time strategy” names the clock and the scope. “Platformer” names the thing you stand on, which is at least unusual. Every functional genre name isolates a difference.

Walking is not a difference. You walk in Half-Life. You walk in Skyrim, in Deus Ex, in Silent Hill, in every 3D game since Ultima Underworld — walking is the default state of the entire medium’s dominant camera. Naming these games after it is like naming a novel a “reading simulator”. It picks out the substrate and calls it the subject.

Worse, it’s inaccurate about the games it’s aimed at. Firewatch (Campo Santo, 2016) hands you a paper map and a compass and declines to give you a waypoint, so getting anywhere requires you to orienteer — read the map, find a landmark, match it to the terrain. That’s a navigation skill and it’s more genuine wayfinding than most open worlds ask for, because most open worlds put a triangle on your HUD and switch your brain off. Firewatch also runs a timed dialogue system on the radio where declining to answer is an answer. Call that a walking simulator and you’ve described its legs.

The verb is examine

What these games actually do has a name, and the name is fifty years old.

Go back to the text adventure. You are in a room. There is a desk. EXAMINE DESK. The room description is the content; the parser is the interface; movement between rooms is how you reach the next description. Nobody called Zork a typing simulator, because the typing was obviously the substrate and the descriptions were obviously the game. We lost something real when the parser died, and one of the things we lost was clarity about what we were doing.

Then the graphic adventure kept the verb and drew the room. Then Myst (1993) — an empty island, no people, documents to read, and the best-selling PC game of its era for the better part of a decade — did it in first person, and nobody called Myst anything except an adventure. Then point-and-click died and something replaced it, and the something turned out to be this.

The verb is examine. The walking is how you get from one examinable thing to the next, which is precisely what walking does in every other game ever made.

Gone Home is a metroidvania in a house

The systems read on this genre is more interesting than either its defenders or its detractors let on.

An adventure game is a gated exploration structure. Room contains object, object opens door, door reveals room. The gate is the engine, the puzzle is the lock, and the whole apparatus exists to pace your access to the space.

Walking sims kept the entire structure and swapped what’s behind the gate. In Gone Home (Fullbright, 2013) the Greenbriar house is locked in pieces. There are keys. There are locked doors, a combination you have to find written down somewhere else, and a basement you can’t reach until the game has decided you’re ready. You backtrack. You remember a door from twenty minutes ago because you now have the thing that opens it.

That’s the same skeleton as the metroidvania’s ledger of unopened doors. The currency behind the gate changed from a power-up to a paragraph, and the architecture underneath is identical, right down to the pacing problem it exists to solve.

The lineage is on the record, too. Fullbright’s core came off BioShock 2’s Minerva’s Den, which is audio-log storytelling, which is Looking Glass’s invention — the horror in System Shock 2’s log files is the direct ancestor of the cassette tape on Sam Greenbriar’s desk. These games descend from immersive sims with the sim removed, and they inherited the environmental storytelling and the object-reading and left the physics behind.

There’s craft in that removal, incidentally. With no objective marker, Gone Home has to guide you through a dark two-storey house using lighting alone — a lamp left on, a door ajar, a hallway a shade brighter than the one behind it. That’s level design doing a job that most games hand to a UI element, and it’s harder than the UI element.

Edith Finch and the illiteracy of the label

What Remains of Edith Finch (Giant Sparrow, 2017) took the BAFTA for best game in 2018 and it demolishes the name on contact.

Each family member’s story is a different mechanical toy. One is a kite. One is a comic book you read while it becomes something else. The one everybody remembers puts you in a cannery, chopping fish with one thumbstick, while the other thumbstick drives a daydream that gradually takes over the whole screen — two inputs, two worlds, one collapsing attention, and the mechanic is the argument the vignette is making.

Walking is the corridor between those. It’s the level select. Calling the game a walking simulator is like calling a compilation album a plastic simulator.

The Stanley Parable (Davey Wreden’s 2011 mod, remade with William Pugh in 2013) does the other clever thing: it makes the walking the subject. The narrator tells you where to go and the entire game is what happens when you decline. There the locomotion genuinely is the mechanic, because disobedience needs somewhere to happen, and it’s the one game the label almost fits — which it earns by being about the label.

What to call them

I don’t have a lovely answer. “Environmental narrative” is accurate and sounds like a planning document. “First-person adventure” is honest and admits the Myst lineage, and I’d probably vote for it. Most of the developers, asked directly, say something diplomatic and change the subject, which is fair enough when the alternative is arguing with the internet about goats.

The point of caring is that names do work. A genre named after its legs invites you to evaluate the legs, and eleven years of people announcing that Gone Home has no gameplay is the consequence of a label doing exactly what it was designed to do. The canon of these things is one of the strongest small bodies of work this medium has, and Kentucky Route Zero — a magic-realist road trip released across seven years, one act at a time — is on it despite having a top- down map screen and a car, because the label long ago stopped meaning anything except quiet.

Dear Esther asked what’s left when you take the gun away. The answer, on the record and repeatable, is: a room, a thing in it, and a reason to look. Which is what was there before anyone added the gun.