It’s not often that anyone gets to ask “What would Thoreau’s Walden look like as a game?” without it being a rambling speculative conversation in a pub. Indeed, you have to be in a certain sort of position – say a group of academics at a Californian University – for anyone to take that seriously, much less provide a $40,000 grant to make it happen. Fortunately, that’s precisely what has come to pass, via a National Endowment For The Arts project.
From its boring gameplay loop to design decisions implicitly contradicting Thoreau's greater messages, USC Game Innovation Lab has crafted an ill-conceived adaptation.
Same. The Walden/Civil Disobedience duo is a must-read imo.
I think the issue is this college gaming lab were building a wilderness simulation in Unity and then looked for inspiration to 'gamify' it enough to make a sellable product. Naturally, they looked to the public domain first.
Neil writes: "As gamers we're used to seeing new titles arrive in remastered or rehashed form, as developers take much loved classics from yesteryear and bring them right up to date for a modern audience. That normally means going back a decade or two for the source material. Walden, a game on Xbox though goes further - way back to the original Henry David Thoreau book from 1854, before bringing it all into the virtual world."
"Walden, a Game could have been a culmination of my interests as a researcher in the field of art and humanities: it is a narrative video game about a poet activist who critiqued slavery and the newly-developed modern prison system. However, most of my time spent on the digital Walden Pond has oscillated between boredom and sheer frustration." - Adam@EB
