Like many useful terms – eg, ‘Big Bang’ – the phrase ‘walking simulator’ originated as a derogatory dismissal. (It was the British astronomer Fred Hoyle who, on the BBC in 1949, so described the theory, which he rejected, that the universe had begun in a massive explosion.) If we ignore the prehistory of its literal use (as in NASA’s lowgravity walking simulator for astronauts), the description ‘walking simulator’ arose in the late 2000s to describe a kind of art
