Elegy a Dead World Developer Interview “Advanced literature taught through Space Magic”

In “A Defence of Poetry”, Percy Shelley made the famous (if slightly self-aggrandizing) claim that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”. Language and its inherent desire for rhythm, order and harmony made the poetic sensibility not just relevant to “the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting”; poets are also “the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society.” Reason, to Shelley, is an insufficient tool for maintaining our civilization: imagination, as a cultivated awareness of beauty and truth, plays an ‘unacknowledged’ part in our species’ greatest feats.

An interesting alternative to Shelley’s vision is presented by Dejobaan Games’ “Elegy for a Dead World”, where the poet acts as a chronicler of bygone cataclysms. No longer is the poetic sensibility used as a foundation for human civilization – it just happens to be the only thing left in the wake of vast, uncharted destruction.

The apocalyptic omens typical of the Romantic period, like the volcanic winter that inspired Byron’s “Darkness” (it was written during the Year Without a Summer), are fully realized in “Elegy” – each of its three planets, modeled on Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and John Keats, feature different wastes of once-great but now-ruined civilizations. The result is a short game that contains some superb visual art and provides a compelling alternative to the blinking cursor of a blank Word doc. While the game’s concept – modeling original sci fi worlds on established poets to prompt fiction writing – isn’t taken as far as it could be, “Elegy” nonetheless acts a proof of concept for games that might want to engage players in different creative pursuits.

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The game’s greatest success is cohesively combining its original science fiction worlds with Romantic poetry. The Romantic period encompasses some of the Western world’s most significant revolutions (American, French and Haitian) and saw a shift towards the desire to restart time and become distanced from the past (there were many people, for instance, who wanted to treat the French Revolution as year zero).

This is fitting considering that the setting of “Elegy” is not only divorced from our own history, but is overtly concerned with inspiring the player to articulate a vision of a new future along with an account of the past. Also considering that science fiction really started growing into a genre during this period (there is an H.G Wells prompt within the game), the pairing of Romantic poets with a science fiction video game setting works ingeniously. Never are you wondering how the two relate – “Darkness”, Shelley’s “Ozymandias” and Keats’ “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be” are used as explicit frameworks, and each poem communicates how our deepest personal, existential anxieties about the frailties of our own existence are mirrored in the most stalwart monuments of our greatest civilizations.

The game maintains the Romantic interest in vanished worlds. The key difference here is that, where Romantic literature reproduced historically distant worlds (the opium-induced “phantom world” of “Kubla Khan” and the proud irony of Rameses’ ruin in “Ozymandias” come to mind), “Elegy” produces a sense of distant futures. Players take on the role of the poet by either choosing to write freely (where you traverse the world free to write in any spot of your choice) or opting for one of the game’s writing prompts.

Prompts can ask the player to fill in the blanks of the poet’s work, to write a musical (aptly called ‘Plundering Byron’), to complete the diary of a young girl who no longer calls the world her home, to compose a decree to your people as an Emperor, or to write the crime story about the sociopath who brought destruction to his civilization. There are even grammar prompts for players who just want to improve their grasp of written English. The only disappointing aspect of this feature is the inability to create your own prompts – this is particularly disappointing as a teacher trying to use the game to teach specific aspects or eras of literature. Considering the ‘publishing’ options for your stories/poems (you can share them publicly, receive commendations, and even print your own book), it seems like a missed opportunity to not be able to create your own prompts for your fellow poet chroniclers.

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he environments provided by “Elegy” are straightforward – Shelley’s world shows the player the immense ruins of industry, giving the sense of a bygone culture that invasively shaped the world to their will; Keats’ world is the only one with any remaining life (cow-like animals graze in distant plains) and the stone colossi are the only contrast with the vibrant natural environment; Byron’s world, perhaps the most advanced of the three, contains more domestic ruins that signal a civilization of balance and innovation. Each world is vibrantly realized with its own style of architecture, geography and color palette, and this two dimensional game contains a surprising arrangement of beautiful, haunting vistas – as you move in each world, the foregrounds and backgrounds align in different ways, which lets you catch the lone star’s light through a single standing artifact or eclipse a planet with an abandoned space station in order to generate a moment worth writing about.

While the game presents compelling visual atmospheres, a cohesive soundtrack (“Elegy” contains more general tones and sounds rather than actual music) would help provide inspiring moments for burgeoning writers. The game is also quite small – each world is traversed linearly and quickly, which can make it feel like a promising prototype for a more adventurous, risk-taking game.

However, once seen for what it is – an ingenious writing prompt backed by some tremendous visual artistry – the game can provide a compelling exercise in fiction writing, especially in the classroom. As a teacher, it is always difficult to find effective educational games – all too often these games violently divorce any gameplay from their learning moments (the all-familiar ‘complete the maze to read the information’ tactic). “Elegy” remains unique in that it provides a compelling canvas for students to engage not only with Romantic poetry and verse forms, but with their own visions as writers. In this way it isn’t much of a traditional ‘game’, but its capacity for sharing and prompting stories makes it a brilliant tool for fostering learning communities in the English classroom.

“Elegy” doesn’t present a beloved science fiction narrative – rather, it’s the tool you turn to once you want to try and recreate the profound experience you had of engaging with art that spoke to your innermost self. Remember the brilliant “tears in rain” speech at the end of Blade Runner? Good – now try to recreate that feeling through your own writing composed in a barren science fiction setting.

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While “Elegy” does not end writer’s block, it is a useful tool in helping you articulate compelling apocalyptic visions, to (in the words of Stephen Dedalus) “forge in the smithy of your soul” the uncreated consciences of forgotten planets. Transmuting profound emotional experience and sensibility into language was a key concern of the Romantic poets – Wordsworth spent gallons of ink trying to recreate for the reader the inspiration he felt at the Lake District – and “Elegy” presents this challenge effectively to the player. The game doesn’t make it easy to use language to its fullest possible aesthetic capacity, but it provides a unique framework for taking on that challenge. Especially in an English classroom, “Elegy for a Dead World” remains a simple, engaging way to “open wide the mind’s cage door” when it comes to creative writing.