The Brooklyn Rail

In the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, a robed figure emerges from a desert landscape. Carefully, they take their first steps toward a beacon piercing the distant sky. As their movements gain confidence, steps turn into strides, then leaps, and soon they’re soaring, twirling ecstatically across this dreamlike topography of ruins and dunes. Eventually, the figure arrives at an altar and, as they pause for a moment, the scene gives way to a brilliant white light. The next performer walks on stage and, taking the PlayStation controller from the departing gamer, assumes their position in front of the console. The robed figure sparks back to life and takes off once again.

Journey LIVE is, as BAM puts it, an “alchemical collision of video gameplay and music.” As part of their Next Wave programming, it promises to be an exploration of nothing less than the “untapped artistic frontiers” of our contemporary milieu. In practice, the performance consists of five alternating gamers playing the 2012 indie-adventure game Journey on a screen that flanks the stage while a live orchestra conducted by Austin Wintory—who composed the game’s original soundtrack—sonically responds to the movements of the players in real time. For the December 7 show, players Adithya Pramata, Clare Reynders, Jiuya Lin, Moses Frangopoulos, and Shannon Woodward guided the unnamed figure toward the beacon serving as the game’s implicit terminus.

Throughout the past several decades, gaming has achieved a newfound, if somewhat tenuous, status as an artform. Museums and galleries that once brushed off games as a lowbrow novelty have gradually started to feature them in their hallowed halls; meanwhile, landmark monographs like Grant Tavinor’s The Art of Videogames and essays like Aaron Smuts’s “Are Video Games Art?” have begun to establish the philosophical foundations for thinking about gaming as an art. Yet for all this, the question of what kind of art gaming is remains unsettled: while some have sought to understand games as experimental narratives or hypertexts, others have attempted to situate its artistry within more medium-specific features like its interactive mechanics.

Amidst these ongoing efforts to locate gaming’s artistic value in some static aspect of its design or construction, Journey LIVE gestures toward a radically alternative approach to how we might understand games as a medium. Its best (and, perhaps more revealingly, its clumsiest) moments attune us not to any specific narratological element or aspect of game design, but to the particular performances delivered by the players. As the show progresses, it becomes clear that it’s not some fractal text or yet-untheorized mode of computer art that we see unfolding before us, but bodies arcing through virtual space—a dance.

The fundamental dynamics of Journey are deceptively simple. Players traverse their way toward a far off beacon of light; as they do so, they’re free to slide, run, and trudge through an Ozymandian landscape populated by a smattering of old ruins where enchanted pieces of fabric flutter about. Interacting with this fabric gives the player the ability to briefly float into the air, as if they too were as light as cloth, though this is rarely required to progress the journey itself. There are a few more typical “game” elements layered throughout—in one dungeon-esque part of the map, players must move while avoiding the detection of a dragon-like sentry—but the primary focus of the game lies in the largely undirected and unfettered movement throughout this space.

The game’s elemental simplicity means that our aesthetic engagement with the performance emerges largely from the specific manner in which the players choose to traverse this space: the rhythmic tempo guiding their weightless jumps, the graceful curves of descent as they make their way down a sloped hill. During the show itself, there was a rehearsed quality to these movements. Lin and Reynders would beeline into seemingly desolate voids only to somehow miraculously arrive at abandoned buildings. Pramata would weave through narrow arches in their speedy descent from a hill. Frangopoulos’s jumps would be perfectly timed to just-barely land the character on a distant ledge. I couldn’t shake the dancerly familiarity of the players’ internal rhythm and economy of movement, their ability to build tension with motion, maneuver with such style.

It would’ve been easy to assume that this poetic dynamism was hardcoded into the game itself had Woodward not closed out the show. In contrast to the light, deliberate moves of the other players, Woodward was heavy and awkward—running into walls or missing jumps entirely, as if she had never played the game before. Her character was constantly struggling against the environment, navigating the space like a lumbering cannonball rather than an engaged dance partner. If there was anything gained from these missteps, it was that it retroactively accentuated the thoughtfulness of the previous players’ movements. It’s not entirely clear why a show that proclaimed to “treat [the gamer] like a senior conductor or a concerto soloist,” would make Woodward the climactic player—though it’s hard not to suspect that it was due to her celebrity status as an actor in shows like Westworld (it was, after all, the only “credential” of any player mentioned prior to the show). In its final moments, it’s as if the production lost its nerve and defaulted to the legitimizing power of celebrity because it felt like the game performance alone wasn’t enough to justify its presence at BAM—a move that undermined precisely the perspective that had made it so interesting in the first place.

Journey LIVE’s final stumble shows just how far we have to go before we truly uncover the full possibilities of dancing with games. But to give credit where it’s due, it’s a start—and a far cry from the not-so-distant past when even this possibility was outright rejected. In fact, as recently as 2018, philosophers like Andrew Kania were arguing that “gamers are not performers” because games “are not created with a prescribed role for a work-performer to play.” There are a number of reasons to dispute this characterization—not least because there are plenty of forms of dance where one can perform without giving a performance of something; take, for example, highly improvisational genres like breaking, that prize singular performances over memorized and repeated choreography. But for now, suffice it to say that these nominal squabbles miss the point.

There is beauty to be experienced, if you’re willing to open yourself up to it. The balletic performance of a game can be a source of genuine aesthetic awe. How else to describe Journey LIVE’s best moments? Unsurprisingly, this is something that the gaming community itself has long acknowledged. There’s a reason why clips of graceful “no hit” runs go viral, why hacky speedruns that stretch the spatiotemporal limits of the game are a perennial favorite. Our dances have long emerged from, and responded to, the world around them. Today, that world is made up of flesh and bodies just as much as it is data, algorithms, and code. Despite its flaws, performances like Journey LIVE can encourage us to think about what it means to move within that world. How we might not only learn to live with code, but dance with it.