“Perhaps the walking sim’s greatest power is how it makes players recognize and consider such decisions and the way they influence gaming outcomes and environments. A number of traditional big-budget titles don’t demand this kind of moral engagement, which makes sense—asking a player to stop and consider the horrible things they’re doing is antithetical to moving forward”

In a game without spoken dialogue, these locations become a language for conveying meaning, and the player’s journey one of uncovering, step by literal step, the self of the character whose story is being told.

The key to creating an expressive fictional labyrinth is arousing and regulating the anxiety intrinsic to the form by harnessing it to the act of navigation. Suspense, fear of abandonment, fear of lurking attackers, and fear of loss of self in the undifferentiated mass are part of the emotional landscape of the shimmering web. Moving through the space can therefore feel like an enactment of courage and perseverance, like Gary Cooper’s striding through the town in High Noon

Both the overdetermined form of the single-path maze adventure and the underdetermined form of rhizome fiction work against the interactor’s pleasure in navigation.