Walden, a game, is an experiment in play being made about an experiment in living. The game simulates Henry David Thoreau's experiment in living a simplified existence as articulated in his book Walden. It puts Thoreau’s ideas about the essentials of life into a playable form, in which players can take on the role of Thoreau, attending to the “meaner” tasks of life at the Pond—providing themselves with food, fuel, shelter and clothing—while trying not to lose sight of their relationship to nature, where the Thoreau found the true rewards of his experiment, his "finer fruits" of life. The game is a work in progress, and this talk will look closely at the design of the underlying system and the cycles of thought that have gone into developing it. It will also detail the creation of the game world, which is based on close readings of Thoreau’s work, and the projected path forward for the team as we continue our sojourn in experimental in play.

Previous versions of SimCity used statistics to determine the state of the city; in essence the entire simulation was like a spreadsheet that could be analyzed by simply looking at the stored data. In contrast, the upcoming SimCity game relies on thousands of agents carrying information from one building to the next as they travel along player-created road networks. This makes it next to impossible to understand the simulation by looking at a static data set. In fact, the only way to truly understand the simulation is to keep the agents in motion. During this talk, Stone will discuss how he had to come up with new design techniques in order to tame the chaos wrought by these agents with their own individual needs and agendas.