Ten Years with Thoreau: What a Hermit Can Teach About Game Design

[Music] thanks so much for coming and this talk is about 10 years with throw in case you're in the wrong place I hope you're not and my name is Tracy Fullerton and I just spent more than a decade work making a video game about a classic book called Walden or life in the woods which is a pretty crazy thing to have done right and for those of you who don't know you probably mostly do but I just want to be sensitive for those of you who don't know walden is a book by Henry David Thoreau who was a naturalist a philosopher and a hermit who lived alone on the shores of Walden Pond in Massachusetts from 1845 to 1847 and he wrote about his experiences there he wrote about why he went to live there and his thoughts about life and how we should live it and the game that I made is a first-person exploratory narrative with a light survival McKee set of mechanics and it's set in an open world

simulation of Walden Woods over the course of Thoreau's first year at the pond it actually just shipped on Steam on yesterday and it's it's also available on each i/o and on PlayStation 4 and it will be coming to Xbox this summer if you come down to GDC play we'll have a booth and we'll be showing the Xbox demo in case you want to check it out in case you aren't familiar with the game I want to show a short trailer to give you some context for how it feels what if we could all go to the woods to live deliberately [Music]

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] good day Henry [Music]

[Music] clay as henry david thoreau in Walden of game so the game was produced in my research lab at the University of Southern California the USC game Innovation Lab and it's independent game I should note though that it's also been funded by some unique sources such as the National Endowment for the Humanities the National Endowment for the Arts because of that we are able to make the game free for educators to use in their classrooms so in case there are any teachers in the room this is where you can find out about getting copies for your classrooms so making a game about a famous philosopher hermit is a bit crazy I'm gonna admit that right off the bat you might just be asking

yourself why why not just make a survival game why make it specifically about the RO isn't he just some stuffy old writer who if we grew up in America we were forced to read in high school well the answer to that for me lies in Thoreau's philosophy itself and the rules of the experiment and living that he set for himself down at the pond and the possibility those rules offer to teach us something about the wider palette of challenge and motivation that we as game designers should consider when we're imagining novel game experiences to begin with I I want to acknowledge that Thoreau and his writing are particularly American in their influence I've actually taken the game around the world and I found that there are many people who know of him as a recluse and a hermit but outside America people are not assigned to read him in the way that we are here in our literature classes so usually even if people have not read his

writings they'll still know that he went out into the woods and lived in a cabin alone there and they may actually have a connection to the theme of the book the themes of the book which are about finding balance in life and looking for a relationship in nature because these are actually quite Universal especially today as digital technologies spin our lives faster and faster and farther away from the pace of life in nature so um they're not the modern themes of living are more simply and sustainably our Universal ones it is I would say a particularly American dream to want to go off into the woods and live alone to be completely self-sufficient and apart from society and I know that GDC is an international audience so I want to address upfront that yes this is a strange and interesting and romantic dream this iconoclastic strain of the

American ideology and though I can't see you very well just out of curiosity who here would admit to having dreamed at one time or another maybe going off our own and and living in a cabin having the time to work on our own creative dreams yeah all right okay let's all go together when we could commune so I certainly have right and if you have you you probably knowingly or unknowingly have been influenced by the ideas of Henry David Thoreau who is perhaps the most famous American recluse after maybe the Unabomber so for those who may not remember their Thoreau or or weren't forced to read him it's just a little bit of context about him and his work as I mentioned he was a writer and a naturalist and an activist who lived in the 1800's in Massachusetts in the town of Concord which was also home to a group of writers and philosophers who

would form the core of that generation of American literature people like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne Bronson Alcott and his daughter Louisa May Alcott sometimes joined by Margaret Fuller Herman Melville and a number of others and Thoreau was part of this group and he really wasn't much of a joiner he preferred to be on the outskirts and go his own way his most well-known work is probably on civil disobedience an essay about the importance of throwing our entire lives our bodies into making the kind of change that we believe in and this essay famously inspired read leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King in their own nonviolent acts of resistance against the state but Thoreau himself was not a leader of movements like these men he was he was more interested in discovering a kind of personal truth a system of living if you will that would lead him to what he perceived would be a better more balanced life with a direct relationship

with nature and he didn't think he was going to find that living in Concord working odd jobs and hanging out with a bunch of other writers talking about writing so in the summer of 1845 on July 4th Independence Day he went out into the woods near Concord and built a cabin and lived there for two years two months and two days in pursuit of an idea about how he could best spend his time in life he wanted to strip down his life to its bare minimum so he could judge what was really necessary and what was superfluous what was distracting him from really understanding the essence of life Thoreau called what he was doing an experiment in living but from a game designers point of view to me it really feels a lot like a game he was playing the rules were survive on as little as possible learn ways to optimize your time spent on survival and invest that time into discovering the secrets of nature maintain as high a connection to nature as possible without failing at survival the natural resistance in the system was twofold

first time itself is limited and second even if you cut yourself off from society physically your relationships will make demands on you whether you like it or not in Thoreau's case he did not divorce himself from society entirely so he so much he kind of set himself apart from it within walking distance so these demands actually took more time than we might imagine for someone who we think of as a hermit living out there in those woods now I've actually spent a lot of time elsewhere talking about my personal reasons for choosing this book and this writer to make a game about I'm not going to go into that here but if you're interested in my personal connection to the row and the journey of ten years of production and I'd suggest watching this talk from IndieCade which is all about that today about what I'd like to talk about is how non-traditional throws game design was how he set different motivations for himself as a player and how basing a videogame on this non-traditional set of motivations can

produce a very different kind of experience for players as I mentioned earlier Thoreau wanted to strip down his life into the barest essentials he decided for himself these were food fuel shelter and clothing he lived in the northeast part of America where there are pretty brutal winters so things like shelter and warmth were more critical than if he'd live somewhere else but these basicness nessa necessaries gotten necessaries of life as he calls them are key motivators for him he spent a lot of time providing for them especially at first before he learned to kind of optimize his survival needs and this is something that we can relate to in designing basic survival simulations in many games we often find ourselves creating systems for maintaining player health and strength but the road did not want to maintain health and strength so that he could go off into battle or even fight natural enemies like wolves or bears instead the challenge he set for himself was to battle time he wanted to

optimize his survival needs in such a way as to give himself more time to spend exploring the woods interacting with nature at all levels and gaining inspiration from those interactions he used this inspiration to write pages upon pages and pages of notes in his journal ideas about what he saw and thought each day and how his life and nature differed from the life of his fellow men the reward for Thoreau was not better clothes or a nicer home or even better tools his reward was a wealth of ideas and experience so this is where in the design of Walden a game we had to diverge completely from a standard survival game once you've figured out how to maintain yourself in the woods the idea now is not how to level up your house and tools or build yourself up as a warrior survivor but rather to build yourself up as a lover of nature and the world and in fact in the game if you fall into the trap of working too much on your survival which

we absolutely allow you to do you will find that your life in the woods grows dim and uninteresting the possibility of the space will literally close down visually orally and in terms of the interactive opportunities many players don't realize this is happening right away because they've been trained by virtually all other games that there's only one true path in life one core set of motivations that games mirror exactly this this belief that more is better more food more fuel more more shelf better shelter better clothes all of these make for a better life and the value of riches and success are unquestioning players Minds because most games reward that assumption if you make a game where more is better leveling up is good players feel a sense of comfort with that and their expectations about what they are supposed to be doing in your game confirm what they believe about life in general so if your game has no other aim

than to make people feel comfortable and confirm their general assumptions about life in a kind of acquisition as context this is fine but the ROS experiment was about disproving these assumed constants his philosophy was directed towards a different and more elusive goal and because we wanted our player experience in Walden to reflect and in fact embody that difference we needed a motivation system that would subtly lead players away from standard game goals and those rewards and towards the kind of questioning that had originally inspired the RO we needed to make a game about a unique philosopher exploring the outcomes of an experiment and living under his own special rule set a traditional motivation and a reward system would not suffice we had to refer to mechanics like wealth and acquisition resource management item collection leveling up and the like

allowing players to earn money with odd jobs farming or selling your manuscripts and then using the money you earn to buy better tools or fancy fishing rods or more food storage or even leveling up your shelter with a nice iron cook stove but these gestures to traditional game motivation structures and really to traditional life goals are a trap in the game they don't lead to the ultimate prize of of play which was as Thoreau would have it a life well-lived what generally happens in the game is that a certain point all of the players inspiration has drained away as they have focused on attaining more things or responding to the demands of NPC friends family and colleagues who have literally chased after you out into the woods and demanded that you participate in traditional social structures your mentor Emerson wants you to keep writing and selling your manuscripts your family wants financial aid financial help with paying their bills and emotional support

help grieving their personal losses and the government wants you to pay your taxes like a decent member of society and you can do all these things in the game if you think that that's right and there may even be small rewards for you along the way part by participating in these to-do items but the bigger prize for you as a player lies in balancing your time between your goals of self-sufficient survival and a constant deep relationship with nature and the inspiration it provides only by working constantly to sustain this balance will you find yourself both strong and healthy healthy and able to have the time to explore and reflect on nature and only by sustaining this balance will you have the opportunity to fill your in-game journal with ideas and inspirations the very ideas and inspirations that will allow you playing us the row to finally write the book that is walden one thing we absolutely wanted to avoid of the game was one single win scenario when you're making a

game about a philosopher who set out to challenge common wisdom about what makes life successful it seems very wrong to provide a prescriptive and singular win scenario for players so we made it possible for players to complete the game in a number of ways that may or may not align with the Rose own beliefs while at the same time providing perhaps the greatest sense of achievement for those who do realize the real optimization here is about managing time and balancing their basic and their more ephemeral needs so while one of the different outcomes of the games includes becoming a famous writer and earning substantial paychecks from your editor in New York try to Boston to lecture on your experiences in the woods to do this you would actually need to break with your goals of self-sufficiency and buy things like a fashionable suit in order to go and do that lecture other paths include helping your mentor Emerson with his own writing seeking out books for the lectures that he's working on will also inspire you so there's some efficiency here since your

goals are aligned with Emerson's but there's maybe a growing sense that your need the uniess would to stop doing his bidding and get back to your own experiment in the woods you may also take on surveying jobs in the woods which at first probably seems like an excellent compromise since you wind up spending a lot of time tramping around in nature exploring while earning money you can spend on food and such in the general store but surveying is a tool of commercial development and as you participate in the breaking up of the woods and Depar CIL's you may find that you've become a servant to the needs of an expanding society and are no longer living by your own principles following throws passion as an amateur naturalist you may also spend your time capturing specimens of the wild animals you find in the woods to contribute to the annals of science this can earn you both a bit of money and some obscure credits in a scientific publication again there's a question of whether you following the true prize taking financial reward from nature rather than inspiration and these

are just a few of the possible paths you might follow over the course of the game the open world design of walden contains within an extremely broad possibility space for players to explore this basic question about how best we or Thoreau in this case can spend our time if we choose to focus purely on survival we will never achieve the larger goal of living an inspired life if we choose to focus purely on inspiration we will lose strength and faint away if we take our direction from the various requests that others place on us we may find that some may find some of what we are looking for but not all it is up to each player to discover in our own way our own final reward which in this case in this game actually lies beyond the screen and that's because the most important thing about game design that I learned from the rrrow in a nutshell after spending ten years making a game about a book that he spent 10 years writing is this people want all the wrong things we think we

want to be successful but we really want to be accepted and we think we want freedom but we really want security we are conflicted beings and we are easily distracted from what we really need by what we've been trained to believe that we need game players specifically have been trained to believe they need rewards that they need to win and that they need external motivation to tell them what to do next and to some extent that is clearly true we all need some guidance to help us along but we don't need nearly as much guidance as we think we do in games or in life what the RO is writing about and what we were trying to provide and Walden with our very different kind of survival simulation it's sometimes we need experiences that untrain us that challenge us to upend our assumptions about what we should be striving for and so in a lot of ways Walden a game is an attempt to untrain players it uses the basic design language of survival mechanics combined with a subversive set

of non survival mechanics ie inspiration opportunities and a possibility space threaded with quests that may or may not align with the goal of balancing these mechanics and it frames this experience as a narrative about a historical character whose life is a symbol of American individualism and three free thought that's a lot to put on the shoulders of an indie game it expects quite a lot from our players in terms of self-reflection during play and the ability to parse meaning from game mechanics and a kind of literacy about meaningfulness in play it assumes literacy with more than common traditional game mechanics and a willingness on the part players to accept that those mechanics are only one way of abstracting how the world works if a player can recognize the difference between what is asked to them in a traditional survival game for example and Walden and what is asked of them in life and in Walden they may make a connection that equals the philosophical discoveries of Thoreau in short they may

win our game quite frankly this level of literacy is as rare and game-players as it is in readers of literature to play and discern abstract meaning from that play is a beautiful thing but we as designers don't really train players to engage at that level we don't expect of it it's expected of them that regularly in the same way that we firstly learn to read with literal meaning and to see with represent representational meaning we also first learn to play without abstraction but there is a beauty in reading clay abstractly that if we as designers begin to build into our systems of engagement we may find ourselves able to express entirely new systems of ideas systems of ideas that go beyond acquisition and accomplishment as Universal signifiers of success systems systems of ideas that may lead us and our players away from traditional assumptions about what motivates us in play and in life and systems of ideas that allow us to an express alternative

philosophies as playful experiences before I conclude I want to address one last thing and that is that many people when I hear that I've made a video game about living in nature and specifically about the Rho the famous curmudgeon hermit of Walden Woods they conclude immediately that this is too ironic to be true and I understand the simples I made a video game about a guy who exclaimed to all that we need to simplify our lives but here's the thing he's a guy who wrote a book about it which was the technology of expression of his time all media is a technology words images mechanics these are all technologies of ideas and expression so part of me says no it's not at all ironic to use the media of our time to express these universal questions about how we spend our time in the world if anything asking these questions in a video game is the most pertinent place for us to experience them these days the real question is do we know as players

and its designers how to understand the non-traditional philosophies embodied in this playful system do we know how to play and how to design deliberately I think I might have a few minutes for questions if there are any [Applause] so Walden sorry not Walden Thoreau brought his laundry home to his mother so she could do it for him can you do that in the game yes in fact you can the question is can you bring can you can you get your laundry done by your mother in the game and yes in fact we have an option for you to go home and not only have your mother do your laundry but she's also possibly sometimes baked you a pie so you can you can have pie you can actually live in town do you ought jobs and spend most of your time and conquer it if you would like to become a conquered slacker if you were

gonna spend the next ten years of your life making a game about a different philosophy what would you choose wow that's really a wonderful question my next game is actually not about someone else my next game is a personal game that I'm working on so I don't have a ready answer for you right now I'm kind of embroiled in understanding how to make a game about something that is kind of deeply personal to me Wow I don't think about that one get back to you thank you very much Josh LaBrie very interesting talk my question is when you're talking about a that is like layer follow like the standard path of like leveling up everything that you will be reducing the space of possibilities of the of the nature non so I've seen that something about inspiration and I was wondering how is any like measure of that the player is

aware of it so he can increase or is just there good question yes so the way that we do that is I mentioned I guess I was being pretty vague but yes visually and aurally so inspiration is denoted in the game through the richness of the the world the actual the colors of the world but also the the number of instruments is sort of in the music score so sort of whole lines of the melody will fall out as you become less and less inspired and the world becomes more dim you sort of loses the saturation and it becomes very sort of dull and you could get down to just a kind of very not quite black and white but a very dull experience with a kind of just a heartbeat of music going and a lot of times people don't feel like they're not aware of it immediately but when they talk to you about their experience of it they'll say well I was just feeling really depressed and then I just decided

maybe I should go take a walk by the water and then all of a sudden the music came back and I started feeling better and they you know we tried to we tried to make it so that it wasn't a metre right because you didn't want a metre of inspiration but we wanted to have a more subtle kind of system that allowed you to feel when your inspiration was rising I was a great dog do you so kind of going off of that question are there specific ways for players to sulphurous self-reflect in the game like you said players say that I took a walk by the lake was that like when you ask the players or is there also a way for them to like self reflect in the game did you design for that and anyway we didn't design a way for them to record it within the game but the game is pay sorry I'm not repeating the questions the question is was there are there ways for players to self-reflect in that in the game system there's two things one

is the journal which isn't a self-reflection it's really a collection of everything you've done in the game so everything you looked at and inspected closely will fill your journal and a kind of procedural list of like your notes of your experience but then we also just design the game just quite frankly to be paced so that there's a lot of time for reflection there's even time for reflection when you're doing your basic survival tasks I don't know about you but you know when you're doing things like physical labour like hammering right or you know sawing or something there's actually quite a lot of time for thinking and the same with walking a lot of walking in this game and we wanted to have that time there so that players could be reflecting as they were engaged in these more mundane and mundane tasks of of Thoreau's life fascinating talk thank you could you share a little bit more about the response from players that people

generally kind of get it and do you consider this successful how do you think about success for for a game like this that's a great question so there's there's a lot of different metrics for us the first is that what I've noticed is that we have a core group of players who really get it and when they get it I mean they love it there's there's just a kind of excitement and appreciation and people will often write me very long letter it's about almost like a journal entry about the things that happen to them in the game the story of their experience and how they usually there's an epiphany along the way and they tell me the story of how they reach their particular Epiphany right so that to me number one that's that success we found our players it's never going to be a broad commercial game but we have obviously released it on commercial platforms and I would say that it's done you know

uniquely well for an academic research game because it's was like the top seller on each i/o last year which you know is a small distribution platform but that's still really nice to be able to say and now we're coming to to steam we'll see we'll see how they treat us also on PlayStation we have you know some people who've even created a little players community which I was sort of like oh my god they created a bunch of playing together so those are really nice the other side of the metric is not commercial and it's not even just you know core players and that is educational so we I mentioned we give the game away to teachers and the love of the teachers and the stories that we hear from students in during this game in classrooms is is pretty extreme it's pretty great because it's a real game it's not you know

something trying to shove educational content into a you know small amount of time it's a real experience all open-world game and they and the students really love that it's a you know full 3d immersive world they really love that this doesn't smell like an educational game for them right and so we received quite a lot of prates that way we've also won some awards so that obviously is a nice pat on the back whatever oh all you game is is complex have you ever gotten comparisons with a game like one of the older games that journey just the way feels going through just exploring on a peaceful premise well sure yeah so Genova was one of my students and of course we have very similar aesthetics I would say absolutely yeah yeah I think that's

probably time I'm not certain exactly when we're supposed to end but if there are no more questions I want to thank everybody for coming and have a great GDC [Applause]