A Video Game That Teaches You to Write Poetry

admin | July 25, 2015 | General

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Gaming Win by Writing Poetry and Prose

It sounds strangely bizarre but it’s true.

I’ve played quite a few games during my lifetime where you have to find objects, engage is some problem solving and a significant increase in reaction time. I’ve even recently heard of the ‘Writing Dead’, which encourages speed typing so you don’t get eaten by zombies.

But I’ve never heard of this.

A game has been released where you can finished the story line by writing your own poetry and prose!

What does sound cool, is that at the end of the game you can print out all your writing and make it a book.

Would that inspire you?

We’re still a long way from Master Chief breaking into a Coleridge soliloquy. But game developers Ichiro Lambe and Ziba Scott have edged us a bit closer to that day with Elegy for a Dead World, a game they Kickstarted in October and released on Steam last month.

Elegy lets players write prose and poetry as they explore distant planets and dead civilizations. The player faces 27 challenges in three worlds, each riffing on a specific British Romance-era poem: “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley, “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be” by John Keats, and “Darkness” by Lord Byron.

The different challenges find the player in various roles: an emperor rallying his troops before a doomed battle, for example, or a schoolgirl evacuating a city being bombed. Players travel through beautifully designed backgrounds, while on-screen text narrates the story. But much of the text is left blank—that’s when players tap their inner Wordsworths, finishing the tale with their own imaginations.

Throughout their adventure, players are tasked with using several writing styles: Plugging in blanks in prompts like serious Mad Libs, writing poems in rhyming couplets, or going totally freeform.

Once you’ve completed an Elegy story of your own, you can actually make your tale a printable, readable reality.

“I have a 20-page, full color, glossy coffee table book of an Elegy for a Dead World story,” Lambe says. “You can print it out, and suddenly it becomes a piece you and your friends can talk about. It’s something that you created.”