Elegy for a Dead World

June 27, 2015 12:07 PM

Explore dead civilizations, write about what you find, and share your stories with the world.
posted by the man of twists and turns (12 comments total)

The write stuff: Elegy for a Dead World preview - "The game that you play by writing about it."

Elegy For A Dead World Review: SadLibs
posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:09 PM on June 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

Who would have thought that the studio behind
AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! would make a game devoted to verbiage?
posted by Going To Maine at 12:16 PM on June 27, 2015 [2 favorites]

65 on Metacritic, 68 on Kill Screen, 7 from Gamespot, 7 from Eurogamer.

The AV Club: Elegy For A Dead World doesn’t tell a story; it inspires new ones

Wired: A Video Game That Teaches You To Write Poetyr, Even If It Intimidates You

also on Gamefilter
posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:18 PM on June 27, 2015

I bought it, and really wanted to find it intriguing, but instead it felt sort of half-baked and pretentious. That said, the value of writing prompts differs from person to person, and it might work for someone else.
posted by blahblahblah at 1:00 PM on June 27, 2015

It's a great idea. I feel like it would be amazing if the worlds were generated procedurally. Each time you played, you saw things no one else had seen. You truly were the sole explorer, sharing your discoveries with others.

It couldn't have the beautiful artwork, of course, but that would just leave so much more for the imagination to fill in.

Just look at the stories that come out of Dwarf Fortress, for example.

So perhaps all I'm asking for is Dwarf Fortress...
posted by whatnotever at 1:17 PM on June 27, 2015 [7 favorites]

Have they perfected auto-censoring? Maybe the group of people who find this game intriguing is self-selected to be less likely to abuse this system?
posted by johnnydummkopf at 1:44 PM on June 27, 2015

Sounds kind of interesting. They called that archaeology when I did it, though. Had to get a degree or two first. Still total fiction but at least I got paid for it.
posted by elendil71 at 3:58 PM on June 27, 2015 [2 favorites]

Re: Procedural generation.

This seems like it would be fantastic as a part of something like No Man's Sky. Procedural generation is tricky, though; you always run a risk of generating infinite tracts of sameness, which won't be much to write about, after some initial exploration. A common way to deal with this is to include a bunch of hand-made content which mixes in with the procedurally generated stuff; this always runs out, though... And then another way is to open up the content creation to players, which is where minecraft is so successful.
posted by kaibutsu at 5:18 PM on June 27, 2015 [3 favorites]

Re: Procedural generation.

Sing, O Muse, of Toejam and Earl
posted by prize bull octorok at 5:50 PM on June 27, 2015 [3 favorites]

I believe this was the only game I kickstarted that actually delivered ahead of schedule. Anyway, I love that this exists, if only because it would be great to use in classrooms.
posted by buriednexttoyou at 5:52 PM on June 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

I believe this was the only game I kickstarted that actually delivered ahead of schedule. Anyway, I love that this exists, if only because it would be great to use in classrooms.

I've already made plans to use it in my 6th grade Ancient History class. And my partner wants to use it in his HS English class. I actually contemplated contacting the creators and seeing if they could make an EDU version. That would be all kinds of awesome.
posted by guster4lovers at 7:09 PM on June 27, 2015

What's the over/under on the number of times "They should've sent a poet" gets used by players?
posted by nubs at 8:50 PM on June 27, 2015 [2 favorites]