Proceedings of DiGRA Australia 2020 © 2020 Authors & Digital Games Research Association DiGRA. Personal and educational classroom use of this paper is allowed, commercial use requires specific permission from the author. Mechanics & Materialities: WORLD4 and the Effort of Looking in Videogames Alexander Muscat School of Design RMIT University Melbourne, Australia alexander.muscat@rmit.edu.au EXTENDED ABSTRACT Keywords Practice based research, walking simulators, materiality, embodiment, mechanics INTRODUCTION “Looking and listening are not passive lenses through which we let the world in, but active ways we intend toward the world." --Brendan Keogh (2018, 134) Figure 1: Screenshot, WORLD4. The conventional understanding of walking simulator games (also known as walkers) is that they are mechanically minimalistic or reduced (Keogh 2015; Cross 2016), intentionally stripping away mechanistic conventions like puzzles, obstacles, or repetitive failure-states (Kill Screen Staff 2016; Irwin 2017) that may impede “experiencing the narrative, with the exception of finding objects” (Clark 2017). Some critics, advancing a broader understanding of ‘gameplay’, suggest that walker gameplay takes place largely within the player’s own head (Bozdog, Galloway 2016; Franklin 2015; Cross 2015), affording experiences of interpretation and self-reflection through exploratory play (Muscat et al. 2016; Street 2016; Carbo-Mascarell 2016;