by ted2112, HSM team writer

Most of us know what’s around the next corner. What lies beyond the next mile. We know how the world works and how it fails to work. As much as we can traverse the day that falls at our feet, however, we are for the most part powerless to change its trajectory.

I love the works of Henry David Thoreau. For me he represents a kind of anarchy from the established norms of our comfortable life: a glimpse into what could possibly be if we could unshackle ourselves from that day that falls at our feet everyday. Thoreau said, “It’s not what you look at that matters; it’s what you see.”

I think he would very much have liked Home.

I am also inspired by Alexander Supertramp, a modern-day explorer who traded in his real name of Christopher McCandless and adopted a life of exploration on the road. He did this without the aid of money in an effort to find a peaceful solitude away from a comfortable and predictable modern society. His philosophy was, “The core of Man’s existence comes from new experiences.” As much as I take inspiration from his quest I could never summon the courage to give up all my earthly goods and attempt one myself.

The Buddha, Jack Kerouac, and Anthony Bourdain are all examples of the romantic notion of separating yourself and turning your exploration forward — and in their case, they did so, via the means available to them at the time. Their deeds still echo and inspire us to this day because it’s something we all want to do ourselves. They fought for the freedom to not know what’s around the next corner — and in Home, we do the same.

Space may be the final frontier, but it is a frontier we will never see; yet the cyberspace of Sony’s Home servers are a wild we can lose ourselves in, all from the comfort of our own home. Home gives us the exquisitely rare privilege of surrounding ourselves with the unknown. The road that lays itself at our feet is nether ours nor completely static. This type of gaming is perhaps the last real-time adventure that crosses us over from our known to the unknown.

It’s funny: for most of us, we will fight tooth and nail to stay comfortably within the known. GPS keeps us from getting off the beaten path. The internet keeps us from ever being without the collective wisdom of society. The mantra, “the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know,” is considered a wise truth.

We all need society. We all need to belong to something and the comforts of the familiar and stable — and it’s not wrong to feel so. As much as we long for adventure, very few of us will ever do so, and this is where video games — along with skydiving and a host of other things we find in glossy pamphlets by the resort concierge desk — fill the need. Like Kerouac and Thoreau, we must face our adventure with what we have available to us.

I have never taken a trek across the desert to find the meaning of life, yet I have experienced the wonder of the video game Journey. I have never traveled to Paris, but I have been to Disney’s EPCOT. I have never owned a car capable of traveling very fast, but I have raced a rocket-powered sled along the Industrial Sector of Sodium2’s Project Velocity, and all I have gained from these experiences are real to me.

I consider myself an explorer, much in the way of Alexander Supertramp, yet my journey is in the mind’s eye. Like Morpheus from The Matrix once asked, “What is real? How do you define real?”

There are a million different answers, and everyone’s is different. A million different roads unravel at our feet every day, and like the poem The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost, what one will you choose, and what will the difference be?

The wild awaits and the outcome is not known. When we log on to Home this frontier takes us and we become explores.

What’s around the next corner? We’ll just have to find out.

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