A Short Hike reminds us to take joy in diversion

A Short Hike (Adam Robinson-Yu, 2019) is a game with only one real goal: climb the mountain. From the moment we set out from our aunt’s cabin at the very base of Hawk Peak Provincial Park, however, we are met with distractions: one character asks you to collect 15 shells for some reason; another one invites you to join their rock climbing club; yet another pleads with you to find their missing lucky headband. You can, of course, ignore all of these characters, just head straight for the summit. In doing so, you miss out on what exactly makes this game work in the first place—narratively and mechanically.

In A Short Hike we play as Claire, an anthropomorphic crow in the style of Animal Crossing villagers who has gone with her aunt to spend some time at Hawk Peak, away from the things in her regular life that give her stress. Claire wakes up in the afternoon, having spent the day after her arrival waiting on an important phone call. Her aunt, a park ranger, casually reminds her that there’s no cellular reception down here, but that she might be able to get some at the summit of Hawk Peak, just “a short hike” away. And thus begins the journey, with no small amount of implied urgency.

As we make our way to the main trail that will get us up the mountain, the people we meet will give us important information or items, like a compass, a tutorial on how to glide, or most importantly Golden Feathers, items that boost our stamina and allow us to climb vertical surfaces. Ignoring these characters is possible, but doing so will prevent you from progressing very far, especially as new elements, like longer gaps you have to glide over, taller cliff-faces, and frigid temperatures that limit your golden feathers’ effectiveness, get introduced.

Nothing these characters tell you or ask you to do for or with them is very difficult, of course. Whether it’s learning how to climb with the rock-climbing club, playing stickbeachball (a co-op Calvinball-style variant on volleyball), going fishing, finding a toy shovel to trade with a kid for their much bigger – and more useful to us – shovel, and so on, the distractions are the point. If the game simply gave us all the tools to be successful from the get-go, allowing us to ignore all the other park-goers, we could make it up to the summit in a matter of minutes. We’d sit at the summit feeling unsatisfied and bored with the experience.

Melos Han-Tani’s got a post up at his substack about something he calls the “Relational Playworld.” He uses the concept to describe ways to counteract or build an alternative to the more conservative “legacy taste” of the so-called “Product Playworld.” A game like A Short Hike is a perfect place to analyze these two modes of interaction. In the “Product Playworld,” I’m trying to extract some kind of “objective” value out of my time in Hawk Peak Park, a way to convert the money I spent on the game into something meaningful per minute played. There is something bad about wasted time, time not spent accomplishing something, reaching a goal, proving mastery over the mechanics of the world. But to play this particular game in this particular way is to miss what makes it special: the autumnal aesthetics, the familiar crunchy Animal Crossing on 3DS art direction, the cutesy animal characters and their park-faring activities – ultimately, the very narrative point of distraction itself.

The appeal of the Product Playworld is that people don’t need to do much to live in it. It’s the default mode of interacting with games, it’s the playspace so many people demand game reviewers live in: just tell me if it’s worth my limited time and money to buy this game. The Relational Playworld, on the other hand, presents us with an alternative that might be difficult to reach but ultimately more satisfying. Han-Tani defines this playworld as “viewing games more as a kind of ‘bag of experiences and relations’ created by the player and designer, rather than just a product you play.” In this paradigm we’re invited into a designer’s space, to engage with the ideas they’ve been having and enter into a dialogue with them.

In the Relational Playworld, when I open A Short Hike I’m being asked to come hang out at this park, to wander its terrain, uncover secrets, bask in the vibes (and it really does have good vibes). The fact that I only have one real goal (that is, one goal that would get me to credits) indeed opens up a whole range of possibilities from which I can take my pick at my leisure. Do I want to get the highest-possible score at stickbeachball? Find all the secret treasure maps? Grow all the rubber flowers? Become really good at fishing? The summit will be there when I’m done, when I’ve decided I no longer wish to be in this space. But until then I’m free to do whatever I want here. I can leave and return, soak myself in the relaxing audiovisual tableau whenever I want, take a moment for myself. I don’t believe games offer the kind of escapism people often claim, but they can provide brief respites like this.

By the time Claire reaches the summit, she’s carrying with her the sum total of the experiences she’s had getting there. She sits in awe at the top of Hawk Peak, watching the aurora borealis start to come in over the horizon as the sun sets, basking in the glow of her accomplishment. And then, almost surprising her: she hears her cell phone ring.

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