Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came: The Game

Introduction

Journey on a quest to discover the dark tower, and unravel the mysteries surrounding your expedition to this fabled landmark. What really happened to your dear friend Cuthbert? What strange world are you in? Will you make it to the Dark Tower? Find out in Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came: The Game!

Why Remediate Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came?

Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came lends itself to exploration, simply due to its nature as a poem and the qualities that come with it; chief among them is interpretation. There are dozens of ways to see how a story is told and understand its meaning, especially when considering a medium such as poetry. Our main goal was to remediate this poem that resonated so much with us, in a way that would be able to visualize and nail down OUR interpretation of the story presented.

With this goal in mind, we were left with a lot of creative freedom in how to adapt this story. We began thinking, open interpretation lends itself to creative mediums quite often, especially in the sense of world building and exploration. Due to this, our group decided that the best medium to showcase Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came as a playable video game would be Minecraft.

Why Minecraft? Simply put, Minecraft offers unlimited amounts of creative expression to help build our interpretation of Roland’s journey. For being put out over a decade ago, Minecraft has received numerous updates expanding the game’s catalog of blocks to build with and infinitely increasing the creative possibilities both in building AND in storytelling that are available to the player. In addition, the game is by far one of the most easily accessible platforms to create with, as most of us grew up playing Minecraft or watching videos of people playing Minecraft.

Development Process

After deciding on our platform for remediation, the first piece of the puzzle was to figure out how all three of us were to work collectively on one world in the game. Playing with other players isn’t quite so easy in Minecraft, as one can’t locally host a server to play with other players. The easiest solution came in the form of Minecraft Realms, a subscription-based service for hosting multiplayer worlds for you and your friends. We signed up for the free trial and began our work.

Next, we had to decide where would be the best place to build both the path that Roland journey’s on to the Dark Tower, as well as the Dark Tower itself. After some debate, we decided it would be best to build the path to the Dark Tower inside of the Nether, which is the game’s version of Hell. We hoped that this decision would help to properly showcase Roland’s unstable psyche through his journey and account for many of the hallucinations he has along his journey. Hence, the overgrown and warped forest biome we decided to build in, showing a warped view of a forest landscape that you would see in the real world, as well as adding lava waterfalls and rivers to additionally showcase a warped view of reality from inside of Roland’s mind. 

Along the path to the Dark Tower, we decided to add obstacles to cause frustration and challenge to the player, encapsulating the wavering sanity of Roland. These obstacles included mobs such as Spiders and Zombie Pigmen, as well as physical obstacles such as lava, cobwebs, and gargantuan towers to climb. This helps to foreshadow the Dark Tower Roland has his eye on as the ends to the means of journeying along this horrid path.

Further, we had to make a decision on the structure of the Dark Tower and how we decided to interpret it. Spencer is a fan of the Stephen King series that is based off of the poem. Armed with this knowledge, Spencer set off to conquer the task of the creation of the Dark Tower, taking inspiration from Stephen King’s interpretation: roses, golden road, and all. The end, like the end of the poem, we decided, would be ambiguous on its true nature. The end of the game allows you to find the portal to travel back to the beginning of the journey, but it does not allow you in the Dark Tower, symbolizing a perpetual journey of life and life of journey, also hinting at our interpretation of Roland’s fate (to forever live in this poem in perpetua, rather than reach his final destination successfully).

The actual building of the structures happened rather quickly, our Dark Tower was completed in about two days worth of work, and all the structures in the Nether were completed in just over three days worth of work. We successfully created a walking journey (or really, a “walking simulator”) of Roland’s journey to the Dark Tower.

Challenges (Failures and Successes)

In the realm of challenges, the biggest one was being able to adapt to Minecraft’s unique world layouts and ESPECIALLY its blocky terrain. With everything being made out of blocks, it was somewhat difficult to build certain shapes and structures (ex: curves in staircases or proper pathways) while building. The terrain of every world in the game is randomly generated, so instead of us being able to start from scratch and build from the ground up, we were forced to instead take extra time to landscape the existing terrain, and really roll with the punches based on what we were given.

Another challenge of adapting this archaic, Old English poem into the modern, user-friendly medium of Minecraft is balancing the scale between high-brow and low-brow storytelling. The low-brow storytelling was simply using the medium of Minecraft to tell a psychologically harrowing, complex, and (incredibly) ambiguous story. With the culture of “Minecraft parodies” of popular songs and “Minecraft Youtubers” being marketed towards children ages 13 and younger, the medium of Minecraft is inherently low-brow. To adapt a Browning poem, especially staying true to the source material, was a certainly ambitious task. What we were able to do was to use the signs in Minecraft to mark landmarks in the journey, labeled by stanzas/lines from the poem. Quotes from the poem were mainly chosen on the basis of what the Minecraft landscape could actualize and remediate. For example, the “hoary cripple” at the beginning of poem (line 2) can easily be represented as a Villager, the base NPC for Minecraft’s world. However, there was no object in Minecraft that could actualize the internal monologue and tortured psyche of our protagonist Roland, so quotes like “Thus, I had so long suff’rd in this quest” (line 37) were simply scattered on the path, letting the view of the “hellscape” the player is surrounded by connotate how Roland feels in this part in the journey. To emphasize the tragedy/stakes of the journey, the graves of Cuthbert, Giles, and Frank are scattered throughout the road to the Dark Tower, illustrating other characters/players who have made this same journey, unsuccessfully, motivating both Roland and the Player to keep moving forward.

In terms of successes, we have a lot to celebrate. We successfully were able to learn quite a bit about world design and biome generation of Minecraft to be able to pick suitable locations to build our journey to the Dark Tower. In the general vibe of the build, there is a sense of uneasiness that exists inside (especially in the Nether section) that permeates, which is exactly what we were trying to go for to showcase Roland’s unstable psyche at the time. In addition, in the construction of the Dark Tower, we were able to utilize some building techniques to make building the massive structure much easier. Namely, we were able to construct the massive tower by using lava and water to create massive cobblestone pillars, rather than building them by hand. This takes off possibly hours of work building the structure from the ground up, as well as factoring in the landscaping we already had to do to put the tower in a good location.

Conclusions (What we learned)

To conclude, we learned a lot in the creation of this project. Especially in the realm of world generation and learning how Minecraft works internally to be able to manipulate the game’s world generation to better our own situation while building and constructing our project. In addition, our appreciation for professional builders in the game has grown tremendously, as we created a project of a relatively small size in comparison to some who have recreated all of Rivendell or built gigantic castles within the game. Overall, (and most importantly) we were able to reconnect with our childhoods to create this project, as this is a game many of us grew up on, and for many, began their love of gaming. We were thankful for this opportunity to create and use our imagination to remediate one of our favorite works we got to read during the semester.

Trailer: https://youtu.be/N9o5IFE6X1s

-Ethan, Spencer, and Howard