It is without a doubt that throughout American history, Henry David Thoreau is one of the most recognizable names in classic novels alongside George Orwell, Mark Twain, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Thoreau's Walden, which dates way back to the 1850s, seems like one of the last things you'd expect to be adapted into a video game, yet the small team at USC Games managed to pull off a decent game that gives the book more depth, serving almost as an educational and interactive companion to making Walden a more personal and relatable experience.
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
