Into The Woods, or History as Archive in Walden: A Game
Nathan Schmidt, Contributing Editor
I’m not sure the splash screen for the National Endowment for the Humanities at the beginning of Walden: A Game is doing it any favors. It’s not that I have any particular beef with the NEH, but when you’re working in the already much-maligned genre of edutainment, there’s some debate to be had on how transparently you want to appear to be “making learning fun.” Part of the problem, in other words, of thinking about games as history is that openly historically-minded games come with didactic baggage that can subtract from their playfulness. Games like Oregon Trail and Carmen Sandiego were so successful in part because of their ability to hide their pedagogical intentions behind a screen of adventure (and, in the case of Oregon Trail, the ability to give your characters names from Star Wars so you could have a chuckle when Obi-Wan was the only one who survived the trip. Yes, thank you, I was in fact the coolest kid on the block.). If, right from the beginning, Walden: A Game feels a bit like NPR: A Game—well, that wouldn’t be totally inaccurate, but it wouldn’t quite capture the whole of it, either.
In Walden: A Game, you’re Henry David Thoreau, and you wander around the pond in the first person. There’s a certain amount of resource management: you have to make sure you stay fed, and your clothes stay mended, and your house gets built, and your woodpile stays full. You can also take odd jobs for money, which is great, because Walden is, right out of the gate, a book about economy more than it is about nature. You clear and plant your bean field—but mostly you just wander around and look at stuff, finding various things in the world that prompt Henry to fill his journal with the words that will eventually be in the book. I love it because the best quality I can run Unity games on my laptop makes Walden: A Game look a lot like Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, if all you really did was gather plants for alchemy and nobody ever attacked you. For me, this is a dream come true. We all have our aspirations.
Full disclosure: in my real job, I am supposed to be writing about Henry David Thoreau, not about video games. So, to the question, “Does Walden: A Game accurately represent Thoreau, Walden, and nineteenth-century Concord?” the answer is: a) That’s the wrong question, and b) Yes, it does. The shack from which Thoreau got the boards to build his own dwelling is there, and you have to go find it and pick up those boards before your house will be complete. Walden Pond is not really that big, and the railroad runs across its banks right where it’s supposed to. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s house is nearby, with little Waldo’s toys all over the floor, and, yes, the yellow Thoreau family home is a quick jaunt away, where your mom does indeed leave clean laundry and pie out for you (in the immortal words of Laura Dassow Walls, “No other male American writer has been so discredited for enjoying a meal with loved ones or for not doing his own laundry.”). You can even catch fish and choose to send them to nineteenth-century naturalist (and infamous promoter of racist pseudoscience) Louis Agassiz, as Thoreau did, rather than keep them for your food stores. In terms of the level of detail, this game is a striking labor of love.
But let’s talk about why “is it accurate?” is the wrong question. In any historically-minded game, the question is not, “Does it represent history?”, but rather, “How does it represent history?” This history is gone like Thoreau’s cabin, washed away by the vicissitudes of time and cast up like so much flotsam on the shores of memory. We do not have access to a totally objective standard of accuracy, for this or any history. On the other hand, we also don’t get to just make history up as we go along to suit whatever interests or motivations strike our fancy. The really beautiful thing about Walden: A Game for me is the way it expertly straddles its many boundaries: between edutainment and exploration, between print and digital media, and between historical accuracy and historical narrative. It extrapolates a historical story—and this is the key—from a huge archive of documented evidence. The game represents history as something that can be lived in, not just through invention, but through inference, which is not the same thing as just making it up.
Walden: A Game is not just about offering a faithful representation of a period and a book. Instead, it makes the archive on which it’s built available to the player. It is history-as-easter-egg; every time I find some new detail from this narrative I know quite well, I get the same feeling as I did when I saw the portraits of Mario and Bowser through the window of Hyrule Castle garden in Ocarina of Time. The game is peppered with allusions to and quotes from Walden: The Book, and I love the “journal” mechanic where the pause screen is also a notebook that gradually fills with Thoreau’s observations as you discover them throughout the game’s tiny open world. The local flora and fauna have even been reconstructed, along with Thoreau’s specific observations about many of them. But I am most captivated by the way the game functions as an archival repository of Thoreau’s traces, reminding us that it’s not coherent like a single photograph, but like a collage. It’s not a game about how Concord “really was”; it’s about playing imaginatively at what it reasonably could be. That’s why it works, just like it worked for me to name my Oregon Trail character Obi-Wan: it retells a historical narrative while making room for the imagination.
Greeley, Horace, "Greeley, Horace to Thoreau, Henry David: 1846 Aug 16 " (1846). Brown Archival & Manuscript Collections Online. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
Take, for example, these letters from nineteenth-century editor Horace Greeley to Thoreau. The first one is from the game (could you tell?) and the bottom one is a digitized version of the original 1846 letter. Now, for all of our sakes, I will resist the urge to read these two comparatively. (Why did the developers at the USC Game Innovation Lab omit the Thomas Carlyle reference, though?) Instead, let’s think about what it means for a game to make a version of an archival source available to a player. This letter is mechanically important—you have to actually go to your house, get the manuscript, mail it back to Greeley, and wait for a response. In that sense, it serves a definite, playful purpose. But it’s also an edited and redacted version of a real letter, sent by a real nineteenth-century person with real motivations and intent. It doesn’t really teach us all that much about Horace Greeley, or about Henry David Thoreau, for that matter. Instead, it demonstrates in a powerful way that this game considers itself to be an archival project, which means that it involves, not the retelling of the past, but the present-day production of a narrative from a series of loosely connected items. The archive is never total, and it’s not supposed to be. It’s about peering through the gaps in an incomplete puzzle to see what might fit best. Walden: A Game uses the space between the pieces to give you room to play.
This is borne out just as much through anachronism as it is through accuracy: in Thoreau’s cabin in the game, you find a spyglass. Thoreau did not own a spyglass during the Walden experiment, as the developers well knew, because the quote from his journal that comes up when you look at the spyglass in the game is from 1853 (he bought one that year, for eight dollars). Why would the people who even bothered to get the color of the spyglass right stick something intentionally anachronistic in their historical learning game? Because it teaches us something necessary: the game doesn’t tell us history. The game is the history; history itself is made in the telling. Thoreau’s spyglass is in the game because the game-as-archive is trying to do what it does best, which is not representation but immersion. Unlike a book, where you can return to the same part over and over again, Walden: A Game has about five or six hours to fill us with as much of Thoreau as possible. The joy is not so much in the narrative as it is, in the words of historian Carolyn Steedman, in “the deep satisfaction of finding things”—which, incidentally, Thoreau knew more about than most.
