Walking Simulators: The Digitisation of an Aesthetic Practice

Walking simulators such as Year Walk, Gone Home, and Dear Esther digitise an older aesthetic practice: walking as a means of exploration, discovery, and meaning-making in the Romantic tradition. Carbo-Mascarell advances this thesis through a psychogeographic dérive method, recording her own subjective play in a game log and adopting the persona of Benjamin's flâneur. The argument challenges the dismissive connotation of the genre's name by positioning walking as a legitimate mechanic rather than an absence of one.

The analysis ties each game to a distinct lineage. Year Walk is read as literary psychogeography, its ritual year-walking, deliberate disorientation, and occult imagery echoing Debord, the Surrealists, and writers like Sinclair and Self. Gone Home is framed through urban exploration and Bateman's "seeker" player archetype, in which richly interpretable objects and the spatial arrangement of the house drive an erotetic, question-and-answer narrative structure.

Across the three games, exploration is the core mechanic, and the goal is the search itself rather than a marked objective. Players walk, dig, and collect stories, drawing on a genius loci that turns space into place. The games act as "digital garden paths" that embed narrative in the environment, with designers functioning as architects in Jenkins's model of environmental storytelling. Players add their own experience to a place rather than viewing it as a museum piece, which produces immersion and personal meaning.

The conclusion presents walking simulators as a Romantic-style art form in which the screen serves as a diorama, bringing dangerous or inaccessible explorations into the home. The scope is conceptual and centered on three mid-2010s titles, supported by scholarship in game studies, psychogeography, urban walking, and spatial theory, with sources largely accessed in 2015.