The same old Journey into 2018

“Some people don’t want to free all the birds. And that’s sad,” my seven-year-old says. She’s playing Journey again. Her feet pull up underneath of her on the couch, a wool blanket across her lap, the pastel glow of the gamepad’s light bar angled toward the right-hand side of the screen. She’s comfortable in her pageboy cap and curly telephone cord bracelets. She chats with the game as she plays. Her questions go a little deeper each time. “Why are there two birds here. To lift me and somebody else up?” “This is a symbol I’ve never seen before. I wonder what that means?” “You’re my ancestor. Should I listen to you?”

In that last question, the Should I Listen to My Ancestors question, she refers to cutscenes where the past is wordlessly revealed in bits and pieces by a race of precursors. The precursors, mute, thoughtful giants, are not unlike the player’s more scarf-wearing and cloak-covered traveler. They lean in and examine you--you, their progeny--staring into you for a moment, searching for the light inside, before they share with you the story of their own rise and fall. Even though the precursors no longer live, they passed on a ways and means for their creations to carry on. Do not do this, they seem to be saying. Be better than we were. Do better than we did.

The cloth creatures populating Journey are creatures of the air. But they feel similarly like creatures of the sea. They flock together like birds, but swim together in schools like fish. Even the way the desert sand billows looks like waves on the water. How the wind blows feels like the current coursing through the tides. For everything that says Journey is buried in a wasteland, it sure feels like it’s sunken beneath a bright and shining sea. It also makes sense that my daughter refers to the creatures as fish instead of birds because, well, she just loves water in any form--but she especially loves the ocean.

My daughter, nearly eight, has played Journey since she was five. Ever since she started making memories, basically. For half of her life, relatively speaking. She might’ve played a game or two before Journey, but she doesn’t remember them, and neither to I. Journey taught her how to use a gamepad. Taught her how to correlate three-dimensional movement and perception onto a two-dimensional television screen. Taught her how to project her thoughts into a third-person character, and subsequently how to empathize with a person, place, or thing outside of her own experience. Journey took her further than her arm’s reach. Journey let her express thoughts and feelings outside of her own immediate circumstances. Let her see how it feels when another person comes alongside, or pulls away, from the game’s warmly cooperative moments. She’s learned to move on when others disappear. She learned to stick around when someone new arrives. She’s ecstatic when both her and the other player ping out their musical notes, binging their symbols--their names--to one another.

Less important, but still a natural part of this anonymous buddy exchange, is seeing the color of the other player’s cloak, and how much embroidery fills up the bottom of their cloak. It’s an indicator of experience.The more embroidery, the more times they’ve made it to the end. A couple tracks at the bottom? This could be their first game. Argyle up to the waist? They’ve made it to the mountain many times. The more embroidery, the more times they’ve answered the call to keep bringing more dead spirits back to life, bringing them home, remembering the past, quietly vowing to change the future.

The trip is largely the same from playthrough to playthrough. On occasion there’s a small fork in the road, where you can go left instead of right, right instead of left. But for the most part, the journey is the same, other than having different anonymous players come and go.

But it’s not what changes on the outside that’s important. It’s how you change within. How you, as a player, take in each subsequent playthrough. Journey doesn’t change from the outside in. It changes from the inside out.

Watching my kid play Journey for the umpteenth time may sound boring, but it’s not. It's because the trip is genuine for her, every single time. She’s not faking delight when she sees a new player. She’s not faking curiosity when she takes a slightly different tack from her last run.

I’ve seen her grow while playing this game. Not just in the literal sense, where she started playing three years ago and now she's a couple inches taller on the pencil marks in the door jamb. She's grown because she’s able to face challenges in ways she wouldn’t before. She clutches the controller during the dark underground parts of Journey, when she used to force the controller into my hands. From minute to minute, as a new player arrives on the scene, she’s weighing the other player’s intentions. Does the other player want to play together or alone? Is the other player trying to show me the ropes or merely being impatient and doing it themselves? Is the other player clinging to me for security in those dark underground parts, or simply being a companion and lending their light, thinking I’m the scared one? These thoughts go through her head. They might have gone through mine before, too, but I never voiced them with any clarity of thought like my daughter does.

All of this comes to mind as I ring in the New Year. It’s 2018. Earth’s journey around the sun doesn’t change much from playthrough to playthrough. Sure, we’re hurtling through space at 67,000 miles per hour. But the sun rises, the sun sets. Each year of our lives can feel very much like the previous year, sometimes. I’ve got a little more embroidery on my metaphorical cloak, but I haven’t learned everything there is to learn. (I was using my Capt. Obvious voice just then.) But it’s not about how, year to year, we change from the outside in, but how we change from the inside out.

So, it’s a good thing that’s my gauge for success. I can’t fit into half the pants in my closet, but I’ve started running again. New Year’s Resolutions, etc. Humbug, I know. But the change in me has already started. I'm not instantly skinny now. But I do stand a little taller. I do breathe a little easier. My heart doesn’t start balling up into a fist when I drink soda. Mostly because I’m done drinking soda. So, my journey might still look the same from the outside in, at the moment, but I already feel better from the inside out. This is all so that I can stick around a little longer. So that I can wrestle with my kid a few minutes more. So that I can do more things, help out people around me. As the new year gradually starts to look like last year, I’ll hopefully get outside of myself more often. Maybe even “free the birds,” as my daughter suggests. That just might make things a little less sad.