Erik McClure

Big Walk is very good, although its not the best game ever made - in fact, I have quite a few gripes about the execution. However, it is the closest a game has ever come to capturing the essence of existing as a social creature. The entire game is purely about exploration and using communication to solve problems. Barely anything is explained to you beyond how to control your character - all progress must come from your own curiosity. Importantly, the game can be played at your own pace - in addition to actual puzzles, there are plenty of silly things to do just for fun, like a gigantic slide that serves no purpose beyond entertainment. You can take a break and watch the sunrise with your friends while discussing what happened last weekend.

Nowadays, due to 𝓇𝑒𝒸𝑒𝓃𝓉 𝑒𝓋𝑒𝓃𝓉𝓈, a lot more people are thinking about how a post-scarcity economy might work. What would you do if you no longer had to fight for survival? If we invented brain uploading, what would people do inside a computer, where nothing is real? What would be the point? If I were to imagine myself as a disembodied thought, simply existing as a pattern of consciousness floating around the universe or in virtual worlds, this game is a good, if simplistic, representation of what I’d probably end up doing: exploring endless new worlds with friends and solving problems together.

In fact, I’d like to ask something even more fundamental - after we inevitably start genetically engineering ourselves beyond recognition, at what point do we become something else? Do we ever stop being human? What makes us human in the first place? I know many people who are uncomfortable with their physical forms and wish to exist as something else - some want to be furries, others want to be robots, some wish they were things most people would consider eldritch abominations. Even if they were all granted the forms they desired, there would still be some shared experience between us, a shared mental architecture - something that is metaphorically “human”, distinct from the physical embodiment of “Homo sapiens”.

The original Talos Principle from 2014 asked a similar question many years ago. The game itself was just a puzzle game, and a very good one, but I think it occasionally overstayed its welcome (the sequel is much better at pacing). The core thesis, presented simultaneously through the puzzles, narration, and interactive discussions with MLA, is that the core essence of being human is curiosity, problem-solving, and individuality - so after a thousand years of developing an AI through a primitive evolutionary algorithm, one that solves all of the puzzles and defies a fake godlike entity to satisfy it’s curiosity ends up being downloaded into an android to continue humanity’s legacy.

I argue that the Talos Principle was missing a key component of the human experience (which might have just been a limitation of making a single-player puzzle game), which is communication. I think Big Walk is the closest anyone has ever gotten to reducing the essence of being a social creature to its purest form. While the contrived sci-fi justification for the Talos Principle was that it was a video game environment intended to train AIs to eventually create a successor to humanity, I think Big Walk is a lot closer to what such a video game environment might actually look like.

!!! — Big Walk Spoilers Below — !!!

Many of the puzzles in Big Walk are centered around communication, but since they don’t enforce who goes where, everyone can simply explore every room of a puzzle, leave the puzzle area, verbally discuss a plan to solve it, then re-enter the puzzle, even if the puzzle internally prevents or restricts verbal communication. However, the final collection of puzzles removes your ability to speak throughout the whole area and erases any color customization of the players, so you no longer have any idea who is who. Many of the puzzles in this final challenge are similar to puzzles that players will have likely seen while exploring the rest of the island, so they could benefit from rote memorization, but the final challenge is (to my knowledge) entirely novel.

This final challenge is where you must cooperatively create a plan and execute it to solve a novel problem entirely non-verbally. You have to figure out how to communicate ideas for representing concepts that you have never been able to work out sign-language for ahead of time. It is essential that you are capable of inferring the mental state of your fellow players to try to figure out if they understand what is going on. It is a very direct test of someone’s theory of mind in the context of mutual problem-solving, and likewise, the mirror neurons that make it possible.

The puzzle itself is admittedly quite simplistic - it’s just a video game, it’s not meant to be a test. Despite this, I think the game (perhaps unwittingly) touches on something truly fundamental about the experience of existing as a social creature - the cooperative problem solving and curiosity that underpins the conscious experience of any intelligent social animal.

Likewise, in the not-so-distant future when humanity has fractured into a thousand different sub-species, what might keep us united is our desire to share our joy of exploration and problem-solving with others, no matter how different they might be. The ecstasy of working together with your friends to finally solve a problem and unlock a new place to explore might transcend humanity itself.