[A preview of one of the play screens, featuring the player avatar (a bird), Walt himself, and a waving leaf of grass.]
I’ve pivoted quite a bit from my original proposal. I’m still working with an interactive format, but rather than focusing on themes of control, I’ve decided to make use of spatial and atmospheric features with the Bitsy game engine.
I’ve decided to create an interactive selection of poems from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The player will navigate through an interactive world collecting imagery from a handful of selected poems to unlock others, eventually progressing to an end. Leaves of Grass itself is a unique artifact in that it is a complete work of the author, not in anthology, but in curation. Because of this, I feel it bears division and critical analysis especially well.
Because of the format, I had to choose shorter poems. However, I am also of the opinion that, when many people are taught Whitman, they are primarily exposed to Song of Myself. Though it is a pivotal work of his, there are so many other poems of his that are more accessible to readers, length being a key feature of this accessibility.
The Bitsy engine has some pretty significant limitations, especially in visuals. The game screen is limited to 128 x 128 pixels, and there are some pretty significant challenges to editing the screen. Each tile must be edited separately, rather than being able to paint the whole screen at once. There are some workarounds to this, with which I’ve been experimenting. Audio design is limited as well, to a chiptune editor in the interface, barring the same sort of workaround. However, In the limitations, I’m hoping the imagery of the poetry itself will be able to shine through.
There is a loose linear progression through the game, and therefore through the poems themselves, but there is also a degree of freedom. I want the player to be able to progress through the text based on their personal preference first, and the structure of the game second.
The end result, I hope, will be an interactive essay on the themes and philosophies found in Leaves of Grass. I don’t want to spoil anything, but as of now the game is split into two areas, which represent key points of—in my opinion and analysis of the text—Whitman’s philosophy on life.
I hope everyone has a chance to play it!
I dig. It’s a bit hard for me to visualize the particulars in terms of the user experience and the mode of play you imagine, but here are some things I would think about:
How will you deal with the several edition of the text? LEAVES is a famously “iterative” text that grew through multiple editions in ways that famous extend the organic metaphor of the poem’s content. Might you devise a way to have players explore this issue, moving, not just in the somewhat “linear” fashion you mention above, but from edition to edition? I could imagine a mechanic that asks players to compare “the same” poem or moment in different edition and decide which one they prefer, so they could navigate among the various editions through their play.
The poem features a lot of play with grammatical person: the “I” that “celebrates itself” and the somewhat unstable “you” that seems to be both the individual reader and the democratic “y’all” that is the body politic and is, as such, substitutable for the I. You might think about ways to play with his kind of fugal element, where the I reaches out to the you in a rather gamelike way.
Anyway those are some inchoate thoughts. I’m excited to see where this goes.