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Dejobaan Games and Popcannibal's upcoming experimental game Elegy for a Dead World wants you to write. Part video game, part creative writing exercise and part sociological experiment, Elegy casts players as a wandering scribe exploring the remnants of three lost civilisations. There's no combat, puzzles, or obstacles of any sort. The challenge then, is to interpret what happened and string together the most poetic prose you can for others to rate on Steam Workshop. Yes, Elegy for a Dead World expects you to work. And not the sort of ways games usually ask you to work, by fulfilling rote fetch quests, managing your virtual farm, or eradicating an open world of thugs; it expects you to actually wrack your noggin's vocab to sling together a gripping yarn. Saving the world is easy - writing, however, is hard.
Of course, anyone can write about any video game. Just Google fan fiction for Mass Effect or Resident Evil (or better yet, don't). What makes Elegy so special is that it actually incorporates this meta game into the game itself by giving the player a journal and encouraging them to take notes. By the time they've finished wandering the world, they'll have a full piece of literature which they can then edit before exposing it for all the world to see.
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