Walden, a Game takes Thoreau’s classic into the world of video-lit

Walden is the kind of game in which speed is decidedly not of the essence.

Henry David Thoreau, author of the classic work Walden. Picture: Benjamin D. Maxham

A bearded writer retreats to the tranquil woods of Massachusetts in 1852 and spends the next two years building a cabin, fishing, hoeing beans and contemplating the great American outdoors. Grand Theft Auto it ain’t.

Henry David Thoreau’s classic Walden was released last week as a video game, the latest fusion of the literary and digital worlds, and is remarkable proof of the potential for transforming nonfiction writing into interactive play.

Walden, a Game, has been under development for a decade at the Game Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California. Based on Thoreau’s exploration of self-sufficiency, nature and spiritual discovery, players are encouraged to collect arrowheads, chat with virtual friends, forage for food, and jot notes.

There is no violence, robbery, sex, car chases, guns, swearing or fighting. Nothing explodes. Instead, there is music, birdsong, Thoreau’s gentle meditations on human independence, and a lot of trees. The game starts in summer and ends in winter. Smithsonian magazine called it “the world’s most improbable video game”.

It works by adopting the pace of the book. If players leave insufficient time for contemplation, or work too hard, inspiration ebbs and they start to fail. Most video games encourage speed and conflict. In Walden, a Game, players set their goals, and win by stillness and solitude.

Thoreau was no fan of new technology (“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things”). But he would surely have approved of something that encourages reading and could transform the next generation of literature by immersive play and narrative-building.

Several novels have already been turned into video games, including works by Agatha Christie, Alexandre Dumas, JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis. Nonfiction works have some catching up to do. Thoreau, ever the pioneer, may be the harbinger of a genre of literary video gaming:

Herodotus, Mortal Kombat

Players battle through the Greco-Persian wars of the 5th century BC, pitting the forces of Athenian democracy against the enslaving Persians. Consult the Oracle of Delphi, trick Harpagus into eating his son, and encounter winged serpents and phoenixes. Then win the Battle of Thermopylae.

Machiavelli’s The Prince, Renaissance World of Warcraft

You are an unscrupulous Italian diplomat and political theorist navigating the treacherous waters of 16th-century Italy using guile, deceit and mercenaries. You must advise your prince how to win and maintain power, playing off Borgias against Medicis. Successful play­ers rise high in the Florentine court; fall from favour and you are imprisoned, tortured and exiled.

Samuel Pepys’s Diary, Call of Duty

In which the MP, civil servant, chief secretary to the admiralty and indefatigable diarist escorts players on a tour of 17th-century London through coffee houses, taverns and theatres, to the accompaniment of flageolet music. Navigate through the Anglo-Dutch War, the Plague and the Great Fire of London; tasks include balancing the naval budget and not getting caught by your spouse in a compromising position with the housemaid.

On the Origin of Species, Darwin’s Quest

Board the Beagle as a gentleman naturalist on a five-year journey around the coasts of South America, Tahiti, New Zealand and Australia; discover fossils of extinct mammals; make detailed observations of plants and animals; shoot and eat a guanaco for Christmas dinner; become embroiled in a revolution; invent the theory of evolution and natural selection. In an alternative version of this game, players start as a bacterial micro-organism and eventually evolve into Homo sapiens. Naturally it might take quite a long time to play.

The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, Super Mary

Follow in the footsteps of the “Black Florence Nightingale”, daughter of a Scottish soldier and Jamaican herbal “doctress”, tending wounded soldiers in the Crimean War. The game invites players to combat racial prejudice, sexism and military bureaucracy to set up a “hotel” behind the lines at Sebastopol, where, in the words of the Times correspondent William Howard Russell, you “cure all manner of men with extraordinary success”. The game takes you from slave-era Jamaica, to the battlefields, to the heights of Victorian celebrity.

Martha Gellhorn, War Korrespondent

Go to war, report from the front line, marry Ernest Hemingway, and smuggle yourself on to a hospital ship to witness the D-Day landings. Cover the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Vietnam War, the Arab-Israeli conflicts and the US invasion of Panama in 1989. Have affairs with, inter alia, the French economist Bertrand de Jouvenel; US general James Gavin; the businessman Laurance Rockefeller; and Thomas Matthews, the editor of Time magazine. File on deadline, or lose.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Cokemon

Hunter S. Thompson’s drug-­fuelled semi-autobiography provides the framework for the wildest video-lit experience of all. Players drive to Las Vegas in a digital car with a virtual attorney called Dr Gonzo, in search of the 1960s counterculture version of the American dream. Players must assemble “two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multicoloured uppers, downers, screamers, laughers and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls”. And a suitcase of illegal guns. Battle hallucinations of huge bats and “your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth”.

The Times