Journey

     For this week’s entry, I chose to play Journey, a game that relies on aesthetics – most importantly sound – to drive the narrative forward. In Journey the player voyages through an arid desert in which the soundscape exudes a lonely emptiness that is devoid of life. The environment makes up a large portion of the sound in-game. Overwhelming rushing of sand in the wind, silky waterfalls of sand, and the continuous crunching of your footsteps as you trek onward all reverberate throughout the game world. The other part of the soundscape is the scoring. This scoring, paired with the diegetic environmental sound, is what drives the narrative forward through the use of sensory phenomena (aesthetics) and audio cues.

      The score of Journey contributes immensely to the emotion of the game. The loneliness of the visuals goes hand in hand with the beautiful echoes of string instruments that are carefully strung throughout gameplay. The score is a driving factor in Journey. Whenever the player completes an objective that is contributing to the progression of the game’s narrative; unique non-diegetic music accompanies the moment. These audio cues allow the player to understand that they are moving in the right direction. According to Karen Collins this type of sound is known as interactive non-diegetic sound. Collins describes this term as “sound events occurring in reaction to gameplay, which can react to the player directly, but are also outside the diegesis” (Collins, pg 126). While it could be argued that the score in some cases is diegetic with the chirping/gong sounds that the character makes, I am mainly discussing the score that is overlaying the entire game and can not possibly be diegetic – such as the orchestral instruments. The reasons why this is so effective in Journey is because of the effect of aesthetics. The satisfaction we receive from achieving something is being paired up with pleasing audio cues to cause an effective method of relaying to the player that they are doing something right in-game. In Simon Niedenthal’s writing, he describes there are three core meanings to game aesthetics. One of the three describes aesthetics as “…an expression of the game experienced as pleasure, emotion, formgiving…” (Niedenthal, pg3). By definition, the pleasurable emotions that I experienced due to the non-diegetic score that occurred whenever I would collect pieces of the scarf, or caused a reaction in the ruins, led me to keep continuing to progress in the game’s narrative. This reward of sensory pleasure in a vast sea of deserted wasteland for me was the major driving force in the game. 

Works Cited

Collins, Karen. Game Sound: an Introduction to the History, Theory, and Practice of Video. Game Music and Sound Design. MIT Press, 2008.

Niedenthal, Simon. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Game Aesthetics.” DiGRA. Conference (2009).