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Comment by powvans | Hacker News Reader

I find walking can be a similar experience. It really crystalized for me this summer while walking the Camino de Santiago because of the effect of exploring another country. When you walk, you see everything. The world is huge. Everything is slower, higher fidelity, and for me, richer. You can spend an entire day walking from one town to another. Think of everything you will see! Compare this to driving. Driving is like compression. You could drive between the same two towns in less than an hour. You may see many beautiful things while driving, but the experience is fleeting and momentary. You will miss so many details along the way.

As always, there are tradeoffs, and you can't walk everywhere or always have these types of mindful experiences. On the other hand, life is short and perhaps paradoxically, slower experiences can yield richer days.

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For the same reason I have decided I don't like fast travel in games. The whole thing becomes this strange distorted reality where the travel nodes and their immediate surroundings are over represented in your mental model but most of the rest of the map is blank. Now I don't think games should get rid of their fast travel systems But I find that enjoy the game world a lot more without them and think every one should try.

The first time I did this was the breath of the wild zelda game, I got to the point in the tutorial where they teach you to fast travel and said, "no I don't want to" so I spent the whole game slow traveling around, planing my trips enjoying the scenery finding new routes , Just bumming back and forth across the map enjoying the game and all it's corners in small slices each night, it took me a couple months to get complete and it was great.

My current phase of this madness is Valheim with no portals and no map. and wow it is an experience. With no map you get this hyper distorted view of the landscape the other way around, it is still based on what you can navigate easily but stuff like shorelines and terrain features are over represented and forests are these scary black boxes. Fog is very very scary, more than once fog has rolled in and I got so lost that I have had to say "well I guess I am living here now." I am currently having fun trying to figure out how to use the in game tools as surveying instruments to make my own hand drawn maps.

> For the same reason I have decided I don't like fast travel in games.

I was playing Wing Commander, Privateer way back when (mid-1990's) and didn't realize that there were ways to travel faster. So I did the obvious: I pretended I was a trader on a long haul route, dug out some books and notebooks, and just did whatever until I arrived at my destination or was attacked by pirates. I loved the passive game play in the moment, but I didn't realize how much until about a decade later. That kinda ruined gaming for me in general since games tend to keep the player busy (even if they aren't action games).

In some respects, I think that slow travel offers a sense of authenticity to the game. Well, I should say to some games. Many games set out goals for players. It's obvious why. If there is nothing to accomplish, there is little sense of accomplishment. Yet goals also ruin things in my mind since there is an urgency to get things done to see what the outcome is. Of course, games also reward following up on that urgency. That's contrary to real life where you may be rewarded or you may have to wait upon the rewards.

I'm thinking of the The Forest survival game. The first one in the series was great.

The successor game added an in-game compass/radar which detracted from the immersion, made the world feel small and boring.

I do agree, playing open world games without fast travel can be a bit of a slog though. I considered playing Skyrim without fast travel but many of the quests make you run half way across the map and back multiple times.

Without fast travel you’d be forced to plan your trips more and bundle all the tasks in an area which would be cool. But it’s probably too much to ask for the general public who will see it as annoying.

The hardcore mode of Kingdom Come: Deliverance really made me appreciate the game (although that's the only way I played it). It became a very immersive experience.

Valheim without a map would be a bit too much for me. No way to quickly escape to some safe green pastures sounds too stressful :).

Valheim does that so well. The feeling of walking through an unfamiliar forest and stumbling across a faint trail that you made weeks ago, knowing that it will eventually lead you back to your old base and thus back to where you were trying to get to before you got lost…

Reading the Reddit for the game, filled with people complaining that the portal system is too restrictive and forces them to make upwards of three long boat trips over the course of the game is a bit sad. It’s as though they expect the fun to happen when they finish everything, but the fun all happens while you’re actually playing the game.

There is a great meditation in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance about the differences between riding and driving. Being open to the elements, in and a part of nature, is visceral. Bubbled in a car, our surroundings are observed more than experienced. That's always resonated for me.

That’s a book I’ve been taking my time with. Read a bit every few weeks. Found the part about visual memory mechanics resonated: I have to spread everything out and see it when doing mechanic work.

No to doing books via audiobook because I see the words in my head and it’s massively distracting. Cool if it works for others I guess but like the mechanic excerpt above… not for me.

I like thinking about the scales of speed and the impact it has on one's experience.

I used to fly fairly regularly between Germany and Italy. I'd get on a plane in Munich and get off in Florence, going from a very "German" place to a very "Italian" place. A few years ago I started driving the route, and I was surprised just how much gradation there is between the cultures.

As an American, I always thought of "Italians" and "Germans" as very distinct cultures, but then you drive through Südtirol (or Alto Adige, if you're feeling Italian, the northern most province of Italy) and it feels quite Germanic. Then gradually, as you continue south, you hear more Italian, see more Italianate architecture and place names. Similar story for Alsace between France and Germany.

Of course none of this is all that surprising knowing the history of these areas, but it is very interesting to experience in-person.

I'm sure most places and cultures are like this, even when we think of of them as quite distinct. When you only fly between major cities, you lose so much of the wonderful overlap.

Had the same feeling a while ago, I called it the teleportation effect. From the moment you reduce the time needed to go somewhere, you alter the experience to a point that it's not recognizable. Not to say that it's not nice to see the mountain from the sky for one hour but it is an other thing to go through them.

Something to break the teleportation is obviously to make breaks and enjoy where you are (a lake not too far on the road, any viewpoint...). Plan in advance, have a tent, be ready to not reach your target in one day and you will enjoy a much better a road trip than a train, a plane or even the highway.

Completely agree. I don’t have a car anymore so I walk a lot, and my mental image of the streets is so much more in depth now to the point I could visualise streets down to the stickers on poles.

¡Buen Camino! I walked it 10 years ago and hope to repeat it soon.

I love walking and couple of years ago I moved to LA. I fucking hate how hard to walk in this city. I always knew I liked walking but I didn’t realize how crucial it was for mental health (I grew up around Europe, purely on walkable cities and didn’t get my driving license until 30,years old or something)

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