This chapter focuses on the video game Proteus, a “walking simulator” initially released in 2013. While the game does not seem to have any explicit textual or environmental “source texts” that would easily lend itself to the label of “ecoadaptation,” three years after the original game went up for sale on electronic storefronts, the designers released a physical version of the game which included an audio CD, a photographic history of the game’s development, a “Field Guide” to the fictional island (written in the style of an eighteenth-century naturalist), and a mysterious deck of cards labeled “The Protean Map.” Taken together, the paratextual objects within the aptly named Proteus: Artifact Edition (2016) reveal Proteus to be a palimpsestuous adaptation of the creator’s experience of the natural world, grounded in specific real-world locations and inspired by the tradition of nature walking. Proteus: Artifact Edition thus presents an experiential, aesthetic practice that any work of ecocritical adaptation could benefit from, one which intentionally blurs the boundary between artificial and natural spaces in order to promote mindful and meaningful engagement with both.

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The Nature of Experience and the Experience of Nature in Proteus: Artifact Edition

  • John Sanders

摘要

This chapter focuses on the video game Proteus, a “walking simulator” initially released in 2013. While the game does not seem to have any explicit textual or environmental “source texts” that would easily lend itself to the label of “ecoadaptation,” three years after the original game went up for sale on electronic storefronts, the designers released a physical version of the game which included an audio CD, a photographic history of the game’s development, a “Field Guide” to the fictional island (written in the style of an eighteenth-century naturalist), and a mysterious deck of cards labeled “The Protean Map.” Taken together, the paratextual objects within the aptly named Proteus: Artifact Edition (2016) reveal Proteus to be a palimpsestuous adaptation of the creator’s experience of the natural world, grounded in specific real-world locations and inspired by the tradition of nature walking. Proteus: Artifact Edition thus presents an experiential, aesthetic practice that any work of ecocritical adaptation could benefit from, one which intentionally blurs the boundary between artificial and natural spaces in order to promote mindful and meaningful engagement with both.