I don’t know if it’s just my love for Lucasarts’ adventure games, or if this is a more common association, but there’s something uncannily quest-like about being a tourist moving from island to island in Greece.

Take the remote island of Kastellorizo, for instance. I think that walking around that tiny island was the closest I’ve ever felt to being Guybrush Threepwood; each location on the island – the pier, the mountains, the monastery, the Lycaean tomb, the abondoned house district, the beach – felt like a distinct “screen” with the same NPCs continually inhabiting it.

Whether it was Vangelis and Lazarakis, the competing, neighbouring taverna owners on the pier, each a distinct (and opposite) personality cycling through a fixed routine, day in and day out; the tattooed caretaker of the empty monastery, all dressed in black and idly watering the plants in the ancient compound (which sits at the top of the Four Hundred Steps snaking up the cliff side) and then going down to the town each evening for a pint at the cantina, (where the local priest can also be found on occasion, nursing a beer), or the soldiers from the local army base, wearing mismatched civilian clothing and ordering the cheapest thing on the menu in the local café each morning – after a day or two it started to feel like a well known point and click scenario, after you’ve pointed and clicked on everything, exhausted every dialogue tree, and are scratching your head, wondering how to move forward.

Of course, these aren’t NPCs – the island is inhabited by real people with real lives! – but these real people are used to the ebb and flow of tourists passing through, and it feels like they are reluctant to interact with us in any meaningful way, instead choosing to stick to scripted responses that reduce communication to a minimum. In a way, it made me feel transparent, or reduced to a function.

I have no doubt that they, too, feel like functions in the eyes of the tourists. I think that’s something I’ll have to pay attention to as I continue to travel; I’m not sure if I should just avoid touristy locations, or work on breaking through these scripted conversations (where appropriate) and make myself more accessible and inviting for meaningful communication, but I have to do something, because I don’t want to experience my travels as a game.

I think what I’m trying to do is change the way I experience myself and my life, and thinking of this journey as a computer game is a sort of escape from that responsibility.