‘Walden’ game plumbs Thoreau’s lifestyle
Enjoy the outdoors without forgoing the comforts of home
To celebrate Wednesday’s 200th birthday of the great American thinker Henry David Thoreau, you could take a nature walk, renounce all your possessions or simply read Walden; Or Life in the Woods, his seminal 1854 book.
This year, you can also play the video game.
Thoreau’s two-year experiment at Walden Pond near Concord, Mass., is now the subject of an experimental, full-color 3-D computer game. A decade in the making, it took longer to create than for Thoreau to write the book.
Resembling a first-person shooter — let’s call it a first-person tutor — Walden, a Game can be played on a laptop or home computer. It may look like your typical video game, but don’t be fooled: It is a sly invitation to read and think about Walden, the book, to absorb its worldview and see for yourself what it’s like to “live deliberately,” as Thoreau suggested.
The game’s visionary and main creator, veteran game designer Tracy Fullerton, calls it “my version, my translation, my sort of adaptation.” Like the book, the game holds lessons for those who fear life is speeding up. Actually, Fullerton said, the game could serve as a kind of antidote to fret- ting about how much time we spend with computers and mobile devices.
“We are on these screens, for better or for ill,” she said. “What we need to do is to use them consciously, to be deliberate about our time.”
The founding director of the University of Southern California’s Game Innovation Lab, Fullerton, 52, has been at work on Walden since 2007, along with a small group of co-creators and a rotating cast of graduate students. She finally released the game last week, 172 years to the day after Thoreau went into the woods in 1845. Cost: $18.45.
In the game, players live an abbreviated version of Thoreau’s first year at Walden Pond, surviving by fishing, foraging, maintaining a modest cabin (modeled after the writer’s own) and mending their clothing. But the game is decidedly not a 19th-century version of Survivor. Thoreau wasn’t trying to abandon society, but rather to sit on the edge of it for a while and observe.
“I had more visitors while I lived in the woods than at any other period in my life,” Thoreau wrote, pointing out that he kept three chairs in his cabin: “one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”
A FAITHFUL REPRODUCTION Players are encouraged to spend time in nature — the setting is a stunningly faithful reproduction of Walden Pond and its surroundings, derived from U.S. Geological Survey data and Thoreau’s own sketches. (He was, among other things, a surveyor.)
But if they’d prefer, players can make a fortune growing beans or spend time in Concord, lecturing, writing articles and hanging out in the well-stocked library of Thoreau’s mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson — the books are real, functioning e-books of titles Thoreau would have pulled off the shelf.
Reading and writing can be inspirational, but too much will jeopardize your relationship with nature, Fullerton said. In those moments, the screen drains of color, the music fades and your character momentarily “faints,” only to be quickly revived by friends. Thoreau’s main point, Fullerton said, was that life is not about working or playing, about nature or civilization, but about finding balance between the two.
Though she grew up in suburban Los Angeles, Fullerton can trace her family’s roots to Massachusetts prior to the American Revolution. She first encountered Walden as a child of 12 or so, on summer vacation while floating on a Massachusetts pond behind an aunt’s home, a few miles from Walden Pond.
Her father, an engineer and “big reader,” trained his four children to seek out books associated with the places they visited each summer. “The sound of our family on vacation is the sound of pages turning,” she has said.
Fullerton actually came up with the idea for the game at Walden Pond, as she sat one summer day in 2002 at the site of Thoreau’s cabin. Her company, Spiderdance, a studio that created live multiplayer games, had just shut its doors in the downturn following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and Fullerton was thinking about what would come next.
THE THOREAU EXPERIENCE Though the pond is a popular swimmers’ destination, she visited on a rainy day and had the place to herself. Fullerton used the peaceful setting to read Walden. Thoreau, she realized, was pointing out that people work themselves to death, but that they could throw it off and live a balanced life. Suddenly it dawned her: Why couldn’t everyone play out Thoreau’s experience?
The result is a game like no other, and one that has fascinated journalists for years. When Fullerton’s team in 2012 won a $40,000 National Endowment for the Arts production grant,
TIME’s Erik Hayden warned, “Get ready for some edge-of-your-seat 19th century transcendentalist action!”
Fullerton and her colleagues have spent a decade figuring out how to extract game play from the writings of a man who urged his readers to “cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage.”
The summer he went to Walden Pond, Thoreau was 27 and living in Emerson’s house, a sort of handyman, gardener and tutor to the family’s four children. The Harvard-educated son of a pencil maker was smart, but socially awkward. He loved poetry, looked after the town’s trees and considered himself the “self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms,” half-expecting to be offered a city job for his efforts. Nathaniel Hawthorne, another Concord local, wrote that the young Thoreau was “on intimate terms with the clouds, and can tell the portents of storms.”
Fullerton said most of us — even those who encountered Walden in school — have a simplistic understanding of Thoreau.
“He was so many things — he had such a wide variety of interests,” she said. “A lot of times he gets reduced to ‘that guy who went to live out in the woods.’ That really doesn’t do justice to the breadth of interests that this amazing writer had.”