ranzware
In Robert Walser’s short fiction book The Walk, a young writer decides to step away from his desk and stroll through the country town he lives in. On the outskirts, where small farms and the occasional factory give way to open countryside, he discovers two children playing in the middle of an empty road. After a moment of admiration, his mood sours when he remembers country roads were made for cars, not kids. “I never shall understand how it can be called a pleasure to hurtle past all the images and objects which our beautiful earth displays, as if one had gone mad and had to accelerate for fear of despair,” he thinks.
I’ve started to have similar thoughts in recent years about video games, which can sometimes feel less like pastimes than race cars for the imagination, speeding players through their off-hours on manic itineraries of objective markers, skill tree upgrades, crafting materials, and season pass checklists. They burn time like petrol and leave behind a compulsive obsession that hangs over the mind like smog, lingering for days or weeks.
That may be why, when I discovered DayDream Gaming’s YouTube channel last year, in the unassuming form of a three-hour video titled “[4K] Night Walk in Hogwarts Legacy – Relaxing Tour in the South Coast”, I had the impression of clouds parting, like those extraordinary photos from the early days of Covid-19 lockdowns, when emissions from commuter traffic plummeted and skies all over the world suddenly turned blue again. Though I have no interest in Harry Potter, and zero desire to play Hogwarts Legacy, I immediately clicked, curious to see how someone could take a tranquil three-hour walk through a video game without eventually being interrupted by enemy mobs and needy NPCs, blinking quest markers, UI gauges, floating text boxes, and glowing outlines around ordinary objects.
In place of gameplay, a slow profusion of small details emerged, ones that I would almost certainly have sprinted past on my own: a cat walked onto a footpath, hoping in vain for some affection from the player character; in a village called Cragcroft, freshly lit fires were burning in the hearths of every house, but no one was inside to be warmed by them. Further along the coast, fresh rain drops spattered like freckles on the flagstones beside a ruined guard tower, while a pair of worker imps shoved each other in a strangely soundless argument like mascots miming at an amusement park. Overhead, two white points of light I had thought were stars jumped into motion, and they were small birds turning inland for reasons of their own.
At first, they seemed like frivolous little details, but over time, it was hard not to be drawn in by the peculiarity of each new little wrinkle. They had the same languorous intrigue of Norway’s infamous slow TV movement, which began in 2009 with a six-plus hour broadcast from a camera mounted to the nose of a train making its way across the country. That was later followed by 18 hours of salmon swimming upstream, a five-day feed from a cruise ship sailing to the Arctic Circle, and a 13-hour National Knitting Night, which climaxed with the creation of a sweater. “If you wait past the moment you feel you should cut away, a whole new story emerges,” Rune Moklebest, an executive at Norway’s NRK TV, said in a 2014 interview. “And then it doesn’t take much to become dramatic.”
DayDream Gaming is operated by a software developer in their late 30s, who lives in Helsinki. Over the last four years, they’ve uploaded nearly five hundred videos, some more than seven hours long, which have collectively generated over 30 million views. For source material, they’ve used popular blockbusters such as Elden Ring, Starfield, Red Dead Redemption 2, and less expected titles, including Assetto Corsa, Subnautica, and a demo environment created in Unreal Engine 5 by a small studio that sells art assets on the Unreal Engine Marketplace. “As long as I can make the game relaxing and calming,” DayDream told me over email, “I’ll seek to make something out of it.”
They began uploading in April 2020, a month after the Finnish Parliament first enacted a Covid-19 lockdown, closing the country’s borders, cancelling school, and encouraging non-essential businesses to transition to remote work. It was a period when many flocked to YouTube, hoping to replicate the kinds of connections that made them feel part of a community. People went viral for sharing everyday tasks like redecorating their rooms, going to the gym, studying for school, or cleaning their bathrooms.
It was during this period that DayDream Gaming stumbled on a few pleasant first-person videos of people walking in gentle rain storms. That led them down an algorithmic rabbit hole of first-person walking videos, something that had become a popular subgenre on YouTube, letting viewers imagine they were in downtown Cairo or Tokyo, or adventuring across a frozen glacier top in Iceland, or maybe even meandering down a white sand beach in Bora Bora instead of their lonesome lockdown living rooms.
They wondered if anyone had tried to do something similar with video games, but the closest thing they could find was informational channels such as How Big is the Map, which records the time it takes to cross different game worlds. Inspired by the omission, they decided to try and make some comforting video game walking videos of their own. They started with an hour-long hike through the thawing Taiga forest in theHunter: Call of the Wild, a conveniently slow-paced game with ample options to minimize UI elements.
That was followed by a night walk through downtown Los Santos in Grand Theft Auto 5, office buildings reflecting from pools of rainwater in the streets. Then there was a slow tromp through the jungle surrounding a Vietnamese banana plantation in Far Cry 5: Hours of Darkness; sight-seeing trips through ancient Memphis and Alexandria in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey; a sunset walk across the Golden Gate Bridge in Watch Dogs 2; and an eerie tour of downtown Doha in Battlefield 2042, its towering skyscrapers half-buried after a sandstorm.
Soon, DayDream Gaming was so absorbed by the process of making new videos that they rarely had time or desire to play games for pleasure anymore. “If I do play, it’s usually just testing new games or wandering around and thinking of new ideas for my videos,” they say. Some videos can take weeks to prepare, testing different routes and tinkering with community-made mods to improve in-game lighting or deactivate enemy AI and event scripting. “I do quite a lot of planning for popular titles like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Cyberpunk 2077,” they say. “I’ve made many videos of these games, so with each new video, I try to create something new and interesting. Sometimes good ideas take time to develop… but very seldom can I just start wandering around without any pre-planning.”
In a recent essay, Universal Paperclips designer Frank Lantz described first-person walking videos as a kind of “consciousness porn”, something that makes the audience “feel like hitchhikers, riding along in someone else’s car”. Lantz describes his own attachment to Rambalac, a Russian man living in Japan who’s been posting walking videos to YouTube since 2007: “In every frame we feel his presence, quiet, sweet, and a little sad, stopping to watch a black cat thread its way across a cluttered stoop, showing us the label of the green tea he’s bought from a vending machine, looking away politely from a fellow pedestrian, or standing still, on a rainy night, before the red gate that marks the entrance to a Shinto shrine, entranced.”
It’s tempting to look for the same kinds of personal traces in DayDream Gaming’s videos, but they aren’t really there. What can you really learn about a person from a slow camera pan at a cliffside vista? Or the stubborn refusal to press the sprint button? What they do offer, though, is an intimate portrait of all the revealing seams of automation that peak through each game’s illusion of time and place: the repeated pedestrian models that pop up block after block in Cyberpunk 2077; the peculiarly mathematical way that bushes sway in Far Cry 6, as if their branches were rigged to strings being pulled from rafters in the sky; the almost Vaudevillian speed of a heavy oar boat moving up a river in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, jerking left and right more like an overburdened jet ski than a medieval rowing vessel.
In a funny way, these flaws end up seeming like digital beauty marks, deepening the sense of enchantment produced by trying to squeeze the real world through the cramped keyhole of computer simulation. It’s a familiar dynamic, in large part because of how often we try to squeeze ourselves through the keyhole of algorithmic recommendation engines, being herded from transient obsession to transient obsession—tiny houses, bread-making, van life, GPU benchmarks, Star Wars hotel reviews, and 4K walking videos. It’s pleasurable to give yourself over to it, to become a passenger in the automation, moving down the never-ending chain of links with the same numbing speed of highway travel, staring out at the blurry landscape racing by as if that was the only place left in the world that you could call home.
Kurt Indovina
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