There’s an emerging genre of video games, if you can call them video games, a heavily narrative driven experience in a video game space. Many people have a problem with calling them video games instead, opting to make fun of them by referring to them as “walking simulators” or “screenshot generators” if the games are graphically pleasing enough. Despite a lambasting reaction from many who play games, these same games are lauded by critics, reviewers, and many others.

The critical reaction simply comes from how new video games are as a medium—how the language for them is underdeveloped. In essence, nearly any interactive experience could be considered a video game. Pong is just as much a video game as World of Warcraft is, and yet any person can tell you they are entirely different things. Despite not having the right language, what makes these “walking simulators” so successful?

Personally, they’re incredibly engaging, an emotional or comedic overarching narrative, spoken or written, while you simply explore the environment. Just like video games, despite being in one “genre”, each is as varied as the last. Some tell incredibly dramatic stories, fragmented stories, some are comedic, others sad and hopeful, and some are just people trying to understand themselves. Part of the consensus seems to be simply that because they’re so different from current “standard” games, praise is given for straying from these typical conventions. Though there has to be more, and it ’s easy to know you like something, it’s something else entirely to break it down and put it into words and research.

The largest and most pivotal part of this project is the research, everything needs to be researched as much as possible, without it the final product will hardly be achievable. Gathering qualitative data, as quantitative won’t be nearly as effective in the scope of this project. Exploring narrative archetypes will fit into this, figuring what is and isn’t successful in these regards. After sufficient data has been collected it will be inserted into an “explorable” 3D environment. Taking advantage of the same techniques researched to explore and extrapolate this data into its own entity of similar form and makeup. How this is done precisely is largely up to the data collected.

Simply: what makes a walking simulator so successful? Breaking down several of their key components and finer minutiae. To understand what makes them so successful [or not]. Then create a standalone game, likely centered around featuring this data while using what’s been learned and building a story off all of it.