![]() The passages read are all gleaned from Thoreau’s work and serve to frame the player’s own wanderings along the lines of Thoreau’s Transcendentalist philosophy. While gathering resources and tramping through the woods, the astute player will spot arrowheads that, when picked, trigger voice-over clips read by Into the Wild actor Emile Hirsch. ![]() Image courtesy of USC Game Innovation Lab. In Walden, a Game, chopping wood, working on the shelter, mending clothes and other chores involve minigames. Mechanics like these are the backbone of the survival game genre that, through repetition and procedural feedback, hammers home quite forcefully the necessity of these “necessaries.” Failure to replenish one’s stores is penalized fatigue hampers the player’s movement and can cause fainting, which eats up precious game-time. Players are prompted to go fishing, gather wood, mend their clothes, or fix the cabin-all actions which involve mini-games. The strength of the video game is that it visually reminds players to replenish their stores through icons on the screen. In this way both the book and the game make claims about what is essential in life, and what may be considered a luxury. Thoreau identifies the same “necessaries” in Walden. The simulated environment is rendered in high quality, 3-D images inspired by the Hudson River School, an art movement led by 19 th century American landscape painters.ĭuring the player’s stay at Walden Pond, there are several resources she needs to manage, like food, shelter, clothing, and fuel. The surrounding woods, as well as some of neighboring Concord, can be explored in a leisurely manner. Walden, a Game casts the player as Henry David Thoreau during his two-year stay in a cabin at Walden Pond. Many such insights gleaned from video game scholarship are present in the curriculum guide, which suggests players play critically, thinking about the game rules as they go. Some video games use narrative techniques (plot and character, for example) to stage these claims, but video game scholars argue that treating games merely as narratives means overlooking the unique and medium-specific ways in which they present arguments by simulating interactive, rule-based systems. The guide includes a glossary of essential terms and explains briefly that-like novels and films-video games can be analyzed as vehicles of meaning in the sense that they make claims about the world, pose important questions, or dramatize moral dilemmas. One of the efforts of the curriculum guide is to teach educators and students basic video game literacy. Although its designer, director, and writer, Tracy Fullerton, argues that it’s not “strictly” educational, there is a curriculum guide for educators who wish to incorporate Walden, a Game into their lesson plans, free of charge. In 2017, Walden, a Game, won both Game of the Year and Most Significant Impact Winner. One of the most important festivals to showcase serious games is the Games for Change Festival. The contemporary understanding of the term, however, emphasizes that serious games are engaged with non-trivial topics like mental health, war, social development, and climate change. ![]() Abt coined the term in 1970 to describe games that are explicitly designed to playfully teach problem-solving skills related to concrete issues. Some educational games (notably those which are not targeted at children) are released under a different label: serious games. Like novels and films, video games are sometimes framed as edutainment: media that combines educational and entertainment values. ![]() ![]() They are even exploring the potential of “green” video games to intervene creatively in the discourse of climate change and help raise environmental awareness. Do video games make players more violent? Do they desensitize players to the “real” world and “real” consequences? Although these debates still rage in some circles, developers and video game scholars have also begun exploring the role that video games can play in promoting social change. What are video games good for? Through the 1990s and early 2000s, the question was steeped in moral panic. ![]()
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