Before you worry about the time-sink that will go into playing and winning Big Fish Games’ iOS Robinson Crusoe games, it helps to be mindful that Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is itself a meditation upon filling the emptiness of time. The eponymous hero’s adventures begin in 1651. Lost first to the Moors and subsequently to the expanses of the New World, Crusoe misses Charles I’s defeat by Scottish forces, as well as his trial and execution. He avoids Cromwell’s purging of the Rump parliament and self-appointment as Lord Protector. He is absent during the British seizure of Jamaica as well as during Charles II’s restoration to the throne. Becoming a castaway is in some sense, as Defoe might put it, ‘a happy violence,’ insofar as Crusoe luckily skips out before the Great Plague and the Great Fire, and avoids Dutch attacks on the British fleet. He misses the establishment of the Royal Africa Company, the Test Act, the marriage of William and Mary, the Popish Plot, James II’s accession and the rebellion of the Duke of Monmouth. Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe as a form of escape from the events of his present. Defoe pulls the reader out of history in much the same way that Crusoe pulls Friday into it.

To the extent that the emptiness of modern time must be spent somehow in the making of history and the surviving of it, Crusoe makes the easy choice of labour over leisure. Austrian economists recognized in Robinson Crusoe a fundamental insight: in order to survive Crusoe envisions his projects in their totality, and weighs the various tasks in terms of their cumulative benefit as a singular project. Don’t let your work ethic get in the way, though: the question to ask before sitting down to play a video game is whether or not one is making all that different a choice from Crusoe? Crusoe imagines his present and future history in terms of goal-oriented tasks and the benefits their completion brings, which is why it is so well-suited to game adaptation. Gamification, as Patrick Jagoda points out, derives from modern organizational techniques and “names a condition of seepage through which game mechanics and objectives come to constitute work, leisure, thought patterns, affects, and social relations of the overdeveloped world—that is the ways that a privileged population […] interfaces with the real” (‘Gamification and Other Forms of Play,’ Boundary2, 40:2 [2013]: 113-144 [p. 116]).

Let’s face it, sometimes reading Robinson Crusoe can feel like reading someone else’s ‘to-do’ list. The original Robinson Crusoe iPad app was organized around the theme of shopping. Representing Defoe’s vaunted and anachronistic “realism” as a series of still-life portraits of island scenes, the game mixed the tediousness of shopping with the engrossment of finding one’s property in a scene and ticking those items off a list. I spent hours on the train, on the bus, in between waiting for calls and emails, trying to find all the hand-held weapons in a detailed painting of the deck of a wrecked ship. Crusoe needs to eat, but first dishes and food must be found. For the game player, this may sound like drudgery, but as in any old fashioned board game, absorption in solving a problem (find a leg of mutton in this chaotic scene!) soon overrides the tediousness. The iPad game strips the original text of all spiritual questioning, preferring instead to concentrate on the completion of assigned tasks, after which a portion of Crusoe’s escape vessel would be added to the structure until its final completion. None of these tasks have anything to do with the building of the ship, and most do not appear in the novel, contributing to the feeling that the essence of modernity is the structuring and filling of empty time.

If, while literally twiddling your thumbs, staring intently at an iPad screen and poking at things sounds like the worst of material cultural fetishism and isn’t your cup of tea, then consider skipping ahead to the sequel, Robinson Crusoe and the Cursed Pirates. Be warned: this game has nothing whatsoever to do with anything Daniel Defoe ever wrote. The game credits advertise it as “Inspired by Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe,” so consider it an off-brand sequel created by a group of amusing Grub Street hacks. Between one’s tasks, the original iPad Crusoe story would play out in painted inter-titles that briefly introduce Friday and the cannibals. The Cursed Pirates adds recent pirate and zombie entertainments into the mix of the further adventures of Crusoe and Friday as the duo find their escape from the original island interrupted and are stranded on an island of undead pirates, trapped by their former captain and his voodoo magic. The saga of the original pirate crew unfolds between “chapters” of the game. Bracketing the story, the gameplay is now significantly more sophisticated with regular puzzles and challenges heaped on top of the careful searching of still lives. As a feat of motion graphics, the sequel goes far beyond the original game and impressively shows off its chops with the splashing of water (after all, one of the most difficult things for an animator to realistically depict is the flow of water). The panoply of stranded pirates adds an element of humour absent in the original game. Instead of merely finding and reassembling the fragments of a Jolly Roger, the added social diversity of the extended cast allows for the inclusion of queer elements in the challenges such as when one has to help the cross-dressing “Cap’n Guywood” organise his wardrobe. In a nice moment of intertextuality, Guywood wears a cast-off pink dress formerly worn by Guybrush Threepwood in Monkey Island 2, a 1990s pirate-themed point-n-click adventure game. As the game continues, some of these moments of eighteenth-century themed humour accreted and culminate in the disturbing elements of eighteenth-century pirate-themed intolerance of disability combined with gamer humour, such as with one task that involves sawing off the prosthetic leg of a dwarf tied to a pile of fireworks (a nice Orientalist touch). If one has read Simon Dickie’s Cruelty and Laughter that sort of assignment can feel off-putting rather than humorous. Since material culture fetishism is the medium of the gaming here, anything can become a hidden treasure, and lost on an island where things need to have a use value rather than exchange value, gems and the filthy gold coins that our stereotypical Italian avatars used to leap for have lost their visual interest, and any other kind of object instead takes on perverse fetishistic interest. The line between finding and perversion begins to blur, and your mileage may vary at the outcome, especially when one arrives at a brief, but also slightly funny, scene involving the infliction of animal cruelty. One might be morally bothered by the task of finding hidden fruits and vegetables in order to appease a black cannibal boy hungrily eyeing a sleeping pirate; on the other hand, it’s also entertaining to see a solitary footprint on the pirate’s belly.

Friends have suggested to me that Robinson Crusoe may have been suited to a different kind of gameplay. One threw out the idea of a SimCity style game where one starts with tenting in goats and then ends up establishing a mini-colony. But what about Defoe’s other works? The designers of the Grand Theft Auto games haven’t the intestinal fortitude to include a female persona with as much character in their games as Roxana, though she might be better suited to levelling up by leaping around to find her prince in a Castlevania style platform game. Personally, I think the casual cruelty of Defoe’s first-person narrators better suits his works to adaptations as first-person shooter games. Anyone for a game of Call of Duty: Moll Flanders?