From Walter Benjamin to the Walking Sim: Flânerie in the Age of the Metaverse

Curtis Maughan's paper, presented at DiGRA 2023, argues that the figure of Walter Benjamin's flâneur, the idle urban wanderer, has returned in digital form through open world games and the "walking simulator" genre, and that this framework can illuminate the coming metaverse. The central thesis is that digital flânerie is an unstable design principle, oscillating between expansiveness and enclosure, hesitancy and frenzy, subjective observation and ubiquitous surveillance. Benjamin's writings on the flâneur, particularly the Artwork essay and his work on Baudelaire, serve as the theoretical anchor for this analysis.

The paper's scope centers on contemporary AAA and independent titles, including Assassin's Creed: Unity, Grand Theft Auto V, Assassin's Creed: Origins, Spider-Man, Dear Esther, Proteus, and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. It traces how developers have moved from incidental open space toward truly open environments with design features that promote aimless exploration, such as the "Discovery Tour" and "Photo Mode." It contrasts this with walking simulators, where walking and looking constitute nearly the only available player input, effectively casting the player as flâneur or flâneuse.

The methodology is qualitative and interpretive rather than statistical. Maughan draws on close case studies of the named games and on interviews with game developers, grounding theoretical claims in observed design practice. No survey sample sizes or quantitative metrics are reported. The paper's concluding argument is that the metaverse, which will borrow both mechanics and visual logic from games and will make surveillant seeing an everyday aesthetic, will require a renewed flâneur-like capacity to perceive and navigate a blended physical and virtual environment.