I know I’m writing about Big Walk a lot this week, but that’s because it’s taken up most of my non-work time. Chris and I helped Nicole play through it, and because the host of a game hangs on to the save, if we wanted to see the end of our game, we had to play with her. This meant we always had to play together, and while you’d think a bunch of people who work at the same job that involves playing video games wouldn’t have a hard time with that, you’d be surprised.
Big Walk is multiplayer-only, a design decision I understand and, after having finished the game, agree with, even if I also get that that might not work for a lot of people. Likewise, because there’s no random matchmaking and the save belongs to one person, it forces you to play with at least one of the same people every time, meaning you just have to work your schedules out. This, too, might be more challenging than some people are interested in–one of the appealing things about games like Fortnite is that you can play with your friends or just jump in on your own, meaning you can at least always play the game when the mood strikes you and your schedule permits. With Big Walk, as eager as I was to play more, if Nicole wasn’t around, I was out of luck.
On a personal level, I hate this kind of thing. One of the ways my years of being a manager has bled into my everyday life is that I have lost almost all patience for scheduling. After a day of dealing with deadlines and writers’ personal foibles, I have zero desire to do the same thing in my own life. As such, I do a lot of things on my own–camping, going to plays or the opera, riding my bike, checking out a new restaurant. Some friends of mine even pointed it out to me recently, asking why I never invite them to things–no offense to them, but sometimes it doesn’t even occur to me. I get frustrated during debates about where everyone wants to eat, or trying to arrange when everyone can go to a movie; if I want to do something, I just go do it.
This isn’t a good thing! I’m proud of the fact that I can do things on my own–I know plenty of people who have never travelled because they have no one to go with, and who think the times I jetted off to Iceland and Norway all alone were very brave. But I also fear it’s a tendency that might calcify over time. One of my big existential fears is becoming a “weird old man,” getting too set in my solitary ways to let other people into my life. And obviously it hurts my friends’ feelings, which of course I don’t want. I struggle to find the line between doing what I want to do and making sure that doesn’t tip over into a selfishness that will ultimately drive my friends away.
But I can’t be that guy in Big Walk. Over the past week I’d find myself with a few hours to play, only for Nicole to not be available. Yesterday, when we were literally at the end, I fucked everyone up by mixing up the recording time for Aftermath’s podcast and making Chris and I leave the game, only to realize I’d misjudged the time by several hours. But by then, Nicole wasn’t available; when she was, Chris and I weren’t, and we couldn’t get together again until much later in the night. There I was, knowing there were only a few climactic moments of game left, and I could do nothing about it on my own; I simply had to wait until other people were ready too.
I’m terrible in those kinds of situations, which bring my whole “am I a solitary weirdo” crisis into full view. At the same time, I think it’s good that the game forces me to sit in my impatience and reminds me that, whatever I tell myself, I am in fact sometimes dependent on other people. The whole game is about this; puzzles have to be solved collectively, and the lack of shared save means the rest of the group is quite literally dependent on the host to keep playing. The way the game is built emphasizes the themes inside it, and if you want to play it, you just have to work that out.
It’s a bold decision in our era of live service games and “friendslop,” and I think it’s effective at conveying the game’s message. But it can be a total drag; it might have worked better during the early days of covid that inspired the game, but now that life is proceeding at a worse, more crushing pace than it was before 2020, I can see it being simply insurmountable for many people. Despite the challenges of getting Chris, Nicole, and me together, we are still people with relatively flexible schedules who don’t get in trouble with a boss for playing games between 9am and 5pm. For other people, especially those with families and other responsibilities, I can see making progress feeling akin to trying to schedule a doctor’s appointment, planning play sessions for weeks out with no room for flexibility. Or I can see a host and one or two other players in a group making progress on their own if everyone’s schedules just can’t line up.
I think Big Walk wants you to wrangle with all this and make your peace with it, or to play the game at a slower pace than you might personally like just so you don’t leave your friends behind. That just isn’t going to work for a lot of people, which I get can be disappointing, but is also another way Big Walk is doing something different in a games industry often obsessed with forcing games to cater to every player. Of course, I can praise that from my position of being a guy who ostensibly gets paid to play games, and even I struggled to make the time.
Respect to anyone who is having a great time with your friends and not, like me, logging off and then lying in bed desperately wondering if you’re actually an asshole. Being forced to play the game on other people’s timelines was a good chance for me to try to flex my rapidly atrophying “doing things with others” muscles, and a tiny reassurance that maybe I’m not too far gone yet.
