Greg Toppo

USA TODAY

To celebrate Wednesday's 200th birthday of the great American thinker Henry David Thoreau, you could take a nature walk, renounce all your possessions or simply read Walden, or Life in the Woods, his seminal 1854 book.

This year, you can also play the video game.

Thoreau’s two-year experiment at Walden Pond near Concord, Mass., is now the subject of an experimental, full-color 3-D computer game. A decade in the making, it took longer to create than for Thoreau himself to write the book.

Resembling a first-person shooter — let’s call it a first-person tutor — Walden, a Game can be played on a laptop or home computer. It may look like your typical video game, but don't be fooled: It is a sly invitation to read and think about Walden, the book, to absorb its worldview and see for yourself what it’s like to “live deliberately,” as Thoreau suggested.

The game’s visionary and main creator, veteran game designer Tracy Fullerton, calls it “my version, my translation, my sort of adaptation.” Like the book, the game holds lessons for those who fear life is speeding up. Actually, Fullerton said, the game could serve as a kind of antidote to fretting about how much time we spend with computers and mobile devices.

“We are on these screens, for better or for ill,” she said. “What we need to do is to use them consciously, to be deliberate about our time.”

The founding director of the University of Southern California’s Game Innovation Lab, Fullerton, 52, has been at work on Walden since 2007, along with a small group of co-creators and a rotating cast of graduate students. She finally released the game last week, 172 years to the day after Thoreau went into the woods in 1845. Cost: $18.45.

In the game, players live an abbreviated version of Thoreau’s first year at Walden Pond, surviving by fishing, foraging, maintaining a modest cabin (modeled after the writer's own) and mending their clothing. But the game is decidedly not a 19th-century version of Survivor. Thoreau wasn’t trying to abandon society, but rather to sit on the edge of it for a while and observe.

“I had more visitors while I lived in the woods than at any other period in my life,” Thoreau wrote, pointing out that he kept three chairs in his cabin: “one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”

Players are encouraged to spend time in nature — the setting is a stunningly faithful reproduction of Walden Pond and its surroundings, derived from U.S. Geological Survey data and Thoreau’s own sketches (he was, among other things, a surveyor).

But if they’d prefer, players can make a fortune growing beans or spend time in Concord, lecturing, writing articles and hanging out in the well-stocked library of Thoreau’s mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson — the books are real, functioning e-books of titles Thoreau would have pulled off the shelf.

Reading and writing can be inspirational, but too much will jeopardize your relationship with nature, Fullerton said. In those moments, the screen drains of color, the music fades and your character momentarily "faints,” only to be quickly revived by friends. Thoreau’s main point, Fullerton said, was that life is not about working or playing, about nature or civilization, but about finding balance between the two.

Creating a game like no other

Though she grew up in suburban Los Angeles, Fullerton can trace her family’s roots to Massachusetts prior to the American Revolution. She first encountered Walden as a child of 12 or so, on summer vacation while floating on a Massachusetts pond behind an aunt’s home, a few miles from Walden Pond.

Her father, an engineer and “big reader,” trained his four children to seek out books associated with the places they visited each summer. “The sound of our family on vacation is the sound of pages turning,” she has said.

Fullerton actually came up with the idea for the game at Walden Pond, as she sat one summer day in 2002 at the site of Thoreau’s cabin. Her company, Spiderdance, a studio that created live multiplayer games, had just shut its doors in the downturn following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and Fullerton was thinking about what would come next.

Though the pond is a popular swimmers’ destination, she visited on a rainy day and had the place to herself. Fullerton used the peaceful setting to read Walden. Thoreau, she realized, was pointing out that people work themselves to death, but that they could throw it off and live a balanced life. Suddenly it dawned on her: Why couldn’t everyone play out Thoreau’s experience?

The result is a game like no other, and one that has fascinated journalists for years. When Fullerton's team in 2012 won a $40,000 National Endowment for the Arts production grant, TIME’s Erik Hayden warned, “Get ready for some edge-of-your-seat 19th century transcendentalist action!”

While most other games prioritize fighting, running, driving, climbing, puzzle-solving and loot-gathering, Fullerton and her colleagues have spent a decade figuring out how to extract game play from the writings of a man who urged his readers to “cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage.”

'Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts'

The summer he went to Walden Pond, Thoreau was 27 and living in Emerson’s house, a sort of handyman, gardener and tutor to the family’s four children. The Harvard-educated son of a pencil maker was smart and well-read, but socially awkward. He loved poetry, looked after the town’s trees and considered himself the “self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms,” half-expecting to be offered a city job for his efforts. Nathaniel Hawthorne, another Concord local, wrote that the young Thoreau was “on intimate terms with the clouds, and can tell the portents of storms.”

Fullerton said most of us — even those who encountered Walden in school — have a simplistic understanding of Thoreau.

“He was so many things — he had such a wide variety of interests,” she said. “A lot of times he gets reduced to ‘that guy who went to live out in the woods.’ That really doesn’t do justice to the breadth of interests that this amazing writer had.”

By 1845, Thoreau could see the world was speeding up. The railroad had come through town just a year earlier, and workers would soon start laying thousands of miles of telegraph cable across the country. He’d also lost his brother John, who died three years earlier.

“He was wrestling with these questions,” Fullerton said. “He had experienced deep tragedy and was kind of stoic — not the kind of guy who’d go out and talk about it, but he was definitely trying to figure these things out.”

Though he held on to a “sustaining interest for people,” she said, he also wanted to find a way to part with the complexities of the world, most notably the burden of possessions and smothering social ties. “Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends,” he wrote. “Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.”

Getting Thoreau right

Jeffrey Cramer, curator of collections for the Walden Woods Project, said he was “very, very reluctant” to get behind the project when Fullerton approached him in 2007. “Within five minutes of talking to Tracy, I was totally hooked on what she was trying to accomplish.”

Cramer, who admitted that his idea of games was “cars chasing each other” and players “trying to blow up the world,” soon understood Fullerton’s vision. “Her integrity in wanting to get Thoreau right and wanting to get the experience of Walden Pond right — everything about her research — was impeccable.”

An example: Michael Sweet, the game’s sound designer, spent years at Walden Pond, recording its birds, insects and other creatures in each of the four seasons. But his recordings of cardinals ended up on the cutting room floor after he consulted with local birders, who told him that the species migrated north to the pond after Thoreau’s era.

When Cramer broke the news to Fullerton that the correct pronunciation of Thoreau is “THOR-eau,” her team tweaked the voiceover. Also, he said, Sophia, Thoreau’s sister, is pronounced “So-FY-a.”

Though it clashes with our expectations, Fullerton said, “In the end, we went with the accurate way.”

A decade after he met Fullerton, Cramer calls the game “brilliant.”

“It will introduce Thoreau’s ideas to a new generation of people who might not otherwise take the time to understand who Thoreau was,” he said. “Anybody who takes five minutes to sit down with the game will experience something extremely different from what they’ve imagined.”

Even books can't replace nature

Fullerton actually welcomes the criticisms of Luddites and Thoreau purists. To those who say that a walk in the woods beats a video game, she agrees: “I say to them, ‘Go out into the woods.’ The game is in no way attempting to replace the book or a real-world experience in nature. Actually, the goal is to send you to those places.”

She understands readers’ protective impulses around Walden, the book. “I’m protective of books,” she said. “I love books.” But observers should keep an open mind, she said.

Actually, she said, we forget that Walden (the book) is “a media experience about nature. In no way does it replace nature. It has inspired many, many people to go to nature, and I think we could say the same about a song or a film or a game.”

Thomas Knowlton, a school outreach librarian with the New York Public Library’s My Library NYC program, agreed. “Games are simulations of systems, but so are books,” he said. “I would almost say that Walden, the text, is closer to the game than Walden, the woods."

He noted that just as Fullerton and her team compressed Thoreau’s "two years, two months and two days" at Walden Pond into a six-hour game, so did Thoreau reduce his time into a four-season narrative. It works beautifully, he said, but it’s also a kind of adaptation.

Knowlton has played Fullerton’s game and is impressed with how it simulates the push and pull of solitude and society. “It gives you the sensation of (being) in absolute solitude one moment,” he said, "then you walk for a few minutes and suddenly you’re in town.”

The game's depth, he said, will impress critics.

Like many educators who have experimented with games, he said people who aren’t familiar with them somehow believe games can’t be serious. But young people naturally gravitate toward the control games give them: They want to explore and discover how a game's system works as they familiarize themselves with the text. “They’re pushing against boundaries,” he said.

Versions of Walden, a Game have been making the rounds of film and game festivals for years — the game was on display this year at the World Economic Forum at Davos, and it’s featured at the Concord Museum in Massachusetts, where Fullerton said one young player got so excited his grandfather had to bribe him to persuade him to stop playing.

“They had to pull him away with the promise that they’d walk to Emerson’s house in real life,” Fullerton said.

Follow Greg Toppo on Twitter: @gtoppo