Waypoint

In my ‘year of books’, perhaps the work that I enjoyed more than any other for the mere pleasure of it all was ‘Extra Lives’ by Tom Bissell. Subtitled ‘Why Video Games Matter’, the book acted as both a wonderful case for video games are art, and a deep-dive into the reality that both developers and the press are missing this mark by a good margin.

It seems as if so much of modern journalism, fueled by the short attention spans, is little more than press releases tidily packaged up for quick consumption. There are few real stories, dismissed to make room for the previews, teasers, and hot-takes.

That’s why I’ve been following Austin Walker as of late on Twitter, one of the only journalists I’ve found who writes from a poetic and thoughtful perspective — and it’s why I was delighted to see that he had been hired by Vice to create an entirely new digital publication.

That publication, called Waypoint, is coming soon, and here’s Walker’s opening lines from the rationale behind the name:

I’ve been to Tamriel and Middle-Earth, to Nilfgaard and Lordran, and each is filled with its share of terrors. But nothing in the vast catalog of fantasy games is as frightening as the nights of Gransys, the world of 2012’s Dragon’s Dogma.

What separates the nighttimes of Gransys from these other game worlds isn’t the catalog of supernatural foes — after decades of playing games, what’s another cyclops or chimera? Instead, it’s the simple fact that once the sun sets in Dragon’s Dogma, a deep darkness falls over the world. That’s not a metaphor. The game literally just gets dark.

In many games, the night brings on a blue hue, communicating to the player that it is night without actually impeding regular gameplay. But the nights of Dragon’s Dogma are designed to get in your way. The sun crosses over the mountains to the west, and suddenly tasks that would be easy by day become challenges. The mountain paths that line the center of the continent are dotted with chasms, and without the light of day, they become treacherous and hungry. The undead corpses of the Abbey’s meager graveyard are doddering distractions at noon, but under the shield of midnight, they overwhelm.

For these reasons, I spent the first dozen hours of Dragon’s Dogma carefully scheduling my treks out into the wilderness. I’d leave at dawn, before the sun had fully risen, and when it hung at the highest point in the sky, I’d turn back toward one of the game’s few harbors of humanity, where I knew I’d be safe. There were occasions where a wrong turn would leave me confused, lost, and holding tightly to my ever-dimming lantern, until finally the night took me. These failures reaffirmed my strategy: While in Gransys, heroes travel by day. The night time is not for us.

This, in a way, perfectly describes everything I love about video games. Sometimes a game becomes more than an entertaining diversion from life, but indeed an event which you not only remember fondly, but desperately want to share with those around you. My favorites are like this ‘Dragon’s Dogma’, where you feel as if you have been incorporated into the world in a very real way, able to share a war story or an uncannily strange adventure with others who may have never even heard of the game in question.

Walker continues:

A waypoint is anything in the world that we orient ourselves by, something that we look to for guidance on a journey. In the past, waypoints were things either natural to the world — that one weird tree, the sharp plateau in the distance — or things placed in the world by those who held the authority to erect watchtowers and fortresses, train yards and taverns. They were places travelers saw on the horizon, places where people stopped to rest and recuperate before moving forward.

But in games, waypoints take on an additional dimension: They are the first (and brightest) illustration of a player’s intention. We use them both to guide us onto our objectives and to lead us off the beaten track and toward wherever our curiosity takes us. Before we assault the fortress, before we start the race, before we leap from one star system to another, we set a waypoint. They are the marks we leave on the map, the beacons we place in the dark that declare, yes, we will walk into the night.

Beautiful. I’m looking forward to seeing what Waypoint has in store.