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Taking a virtual hike: the slow, eerie pleasure of YouTube's video game walking tours
In Robert Walser's short fiction book The Walk, a young writer decides to step away from his desk and stroll through th…
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. Image credit: DayDream Gaming/Warner Bros Games 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.
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