Read the following quote and article and answer the discussion prompt at the end of this reading:
Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time.
– Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Pictured: Thoreau’s Hut by Walden Pond
In ‘Walden’ Video Game, the Challenge Is Stillness
by Robin Pegrebin February 24, 2017 The New York Times
Henry David Thoreau’s classic Walden is the inspiration for what Smithsonian Magazine is calling “the world’s most improbable video game:” Walden, a Game.
Instead of offering the thrills of stealing, violence and copious cursing, the new video game, based on Thoreau’s 19th-century retreat in Massachusetts, will urge players to collect arrowheads, cast their fishing poles into a tranquil pond, buy penny candies and perhaps even jot notes in a journal — all while listening to music, nature sounds and excerpts from the author’s meditations.
While the game is all about simplicity, it has actually been in development for nearly a decade. The lead designer, Tracy J. Fullerton, the director of the Game Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, came up with the idea as a way to reinforce our connection to the natural world and to challenge our hurried culture.
“Games are kinds of rehearsals,” she said in an interview. “It might give you pause in your real life: Maybe instead of sitting on my cellphone, rapidly switching between screens, I should just go for a walk.”
The game — likely to cost $19.99 — takes six hours to play. It starts in the summer and ends a year later — offering players tasks like building a cabin, planting beans or chatting, virtually of course, with Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Should you not leave sufficient time for contemplation, or work too hard, the game cautions: “Your inspiration has become low, but can be regained by reading, attending to sounds of life in the distance, enjoying solitude and interacting with visitors, animal and human.”
Failure to heed the warning will result in a dimming of color and thinning of music.
“You can choose how to spend your time, what to emphasize, the ways the game can play out,” she said. “You might spend all your time in the woods, you might focus on bean farming, you could become a famous author — sending off articles to your editor, Horace Greeley — or you could become an activist, working on the Underground Railroad.”
At a time when the most popular video games include the active participation of the player — slay a soldier to capture enemy territory — the Walden game seems passive by contrast. Yet designer Fullerton said it is no simple stroll in the park. Players who fail to forage for food, for example, will start to faint in the game.
The goal is not to win in any competitive sense, but to achieve work-life balance. “You’re not only trying to survive, you’re seeking inspiration in the woods,” Tracy J. Fullerton said, “If you spend all of your time grinding away on survival tasks, the environment will become less lush. The winning is based on whether you meet your own goals.”
The project has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, though some say video game research is unworthy of federal funds.
Some Thoreau experts are not enthused by an electronic simulation of Walden Pond. “Go out and see your own backyard,” said Richard Higgins, whose book Thoreau and the Language of Trees is to be published in April by the University of California Press. “Nature is all around us.”
The goal is not to win in any competitive sense, but to achieve work-life balance. “You’re not only trying to survive, you’re seeking inspiration in the woods,” lead designer Fullerton said, “If you spend all of your time grinding away on survival tasks, the environment will become less lush. The winning is based on whether you meet your own goals.”
The project has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, though some say video game research is unworthy of federal funds.
And some Thoreau experts are not enthused by an electronic simulation of Walden Pond. “Go out and see your own backyard,” said Richard Higgins, whose book, “Thoreau and the Language of Trees,” is to be published in April by the University of California Press. “Nature is all around us.”
The game — to be released this spring in time for the 200th anniversary of Thoreau’s birthday in July — re-examines the very questions Walden raises about the personal costs of progress, according to its creator.
“Thoreau was sitting in a moment when life was beginning to speed up and he identified that, asking ‘Are our lives better because we now live on railroad time?’” Tracy J. Fullerton said. “We have to ask ourselves the same question today: ‘Are our lives better because we live on internet time?’”
“Maybe we don’t all have the chance to go to the woods,” she added. “But perhaps we can go to this virtual woods and think about the pace of life when we come back to our own world. Maybe it will have an influence — to have considered the pace of Walden.”
Smithsonian Magazine adds:
Tracy J. Fullerton, who has loved Thoreau’s Walden since childhood, hopes the game will get young people who have not read the book to give it a try, or at least inspire them to seek more balance in their lives. Once players get to the end of the game, she says, “maybe they’ll go out for a walk.” Undoubtedly Thoreau would approve of that. Though Thoreau railed against new technologies like the telegraph, he was also a part-time inventor and engineer. Fullerton thinks he might have liked the game. For a world seeking solace on a screen, it could be just what the philosopher ordered.*
*Material added from Britt Peterson. “Can a Video Game Capture the Magic of Walden? Henry
David Thoreau’s famed retreat gets pixelated.” Smithsonian Magazine. March 2017
Argumentation Composition: In your view, can a successful game be made out of Thoreau’s Walden? In your composition, make sure you use one quote from Walden (see: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/205/205-h/205-h.htm) and have some discussion of Thoreau, who he was, and why he went to live alone in the woods.
