Fake Travelling, continued

One might argue against my previous post by saying, travelling by plane or by train can also be seen as "connecting oneself to the world", no? Why should it be not? Why should walking be the only authentic way of travelling, and wouldn't it be a waste to not use modern transportation systems?

My response would be, sure, but the point here really is, what kind of connection is that, and why is it different from the "real" or authentic connections that only walking can provide. 

There are a lot of Uber apps in China, and some of them have different user interface than the usual map system. They just show the starting point and the destination, with an arc or an arrow tying the two together, omitting all the rest on the map. This design makes me uncomfortable. It is as if I had travelled in a time machine, had get to another place without knowing all the in-betweens, without needing to know really. Such ignorance might seem harmless to most, but it annoys me. I would rather have some knowledge about the route, about the cities I passed by, than just tuck the whole map away and focus on the destination only.

It has something to do with our minds. The main reason why we find open world videos games like "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild" so satisfying and so mind blowing is precisely the feeling of rootedness it gave us. We can walk the whole map through, without being blocked by some artificial boundary, some portal, some "back to the main page" design, like most rpg games did before. Used to be, in these rpg games, that there's a world map, and you choose a place to dive into, and there's a limited map just for that place, not connected to any other place on the world map. And the whole game start to lose a certain sense of authenticity and becomes, so to speak, a kind of routine, in which you go to Area 1 to get Material 1,2,3 and then Area 3 to fight Boss 3 for Item X, and all of a sudden it becomes so mechanic, so rigid that you don't feel immersed anymore. You are no longer the character, the role played in the game, you become a next-level player, you play only on the mechanism level, not on the story level. The success that The Legend of Zelda achieved is more about the story than anything else. I still remember the first time I beat the final boss and saved Princess Zelda, the game ended at that point, not a very good thing for an RPG game really, but it gave me such satisfaction I sat on my bed for several minutes, paralyzed, not wanting to leave the feeling just yet. The game ceases to be a simple pleasure machine where you press buttons to get pleasure in your head, if so, then I would immediately go for the next quest, the next relic, or all those bonus stuff for further pleasure. It is quite like the difference between reading a cheap online fiction and reading Les Miserables. Surely The Legend of Zelda (and any other video games) can never be compared to Victor Hugo's work of art; it's Agatha Christie of our time at best, but Agatha is good enough.

To come back a bit, open world games make us feel belonged like never before, and that's because of the matching between our mental map and the real map in the game where we can actually walk through it. It is based on such new experience that we can say, traversing any non-open-world game maps would feel less real, or let's just say fake, because we've already known what it means to be really travelling in an open world game.

One might wonder, if in the near future a whole generation lacks the experience of "true" travelling, that is, travelling on foot, and knows only the "fake" travelling mode, just as those gamers who have played non-open-world games only and are used to the world-map-small-map mode (sometimes called "terrarium/miniscape games"), what kind of mindset or worldview would they have, geographically or physically? One might even wonder, given their full experience in the gaming field, do they get the open world feeling from the video games, and find it strangely missing in the real world, so much so that they actually regard the latter, the real world, a fake experience and the former, the game world, more authentic and more satisfying? 

Wait, isn't it happening already?