Download Joycestick is first Ulysses video game

Joycestick is first Ulysses video game
Sean O’Driscoll
March 20th, 2017
Joseph Nugent, wearing virtual reality
goggles, said that the idea for the Ulysses
video game began as a lighthearted joke.
An Irish professor at an American college is
building the world’s first Ulysses video game.
Joycestick is the result of a year-long
collaboration between Joseph Nugent,
professor of English literature at Boston College, and more than 20 students who taught
themselves programming to create the
game.
The team hope to release the game free on
the internet by Bloomsday, the day of
celebration for Joyce and Ulysses on June
16.
Mr Nugent said that the object of the game
was to feel the emotions of the novel, as
the characters experienced it.
“The big question was to what degree do we gamify it,” he said. “The students wanted to
do deep gamification. In their version the player would be against the clock and would
move around Dublin collecting objects. This is more demanding than what we are going
to be able to fit in at the moment.”
Instead, the game begins in a virtual reality Martello tower, similar to the one in the first
chapter of Ulysses, and the player must find links that lead to other parts of the novel.
Those links will lead to Ulysses audio and text and transport readers to other chapters,
including a pub scene in Dublin.
Mr Nugent, originally from Mullingar, west of Dublin, said that the idea began as a
lighthearted joke but he and his students became more and more intrigued by the idea.
The project became so complex that they brought in coding students from Northeastern
University in Boston to help.