Primrose Road

Yesterday, I played Arden: The World of William Shakespeare for the first time. (Actually, I watched while a colleague "steered." Characters I control tend to walk into walls.) We encountered several characters from Richard III and the Henriad (and Perdita, who greeted us in the street at one point) and many, many badgers.

Loads of badgers.

Edward Castronova, the telecommunications professor who heads up the Arden project, writes in his blog that

"We are taking our experience with Arden I and putting it into “Arden II: London's Burning," conceived entirely as a game. In Arden II, we are not trying to put Shakespeare in front of anyone, nor are we seeking historical or textual accuracy in any way. We are making a game; monsters everywhere. The Bard is there too, but this time, he is not getting in the way of the monsters."

I'm not sure. I thought there were plenty of monsters (feral pigs and .... badgers) to challenge us whenever we tried to get to an important item, but I couldn't quite understand how Shakespeare fit into the picture. I wanted the characters to be the "monsters." I wanted to disguise my avatar as a tree and fight Macbeth, get on the only horse in the field and crush Richard III, or even get Polonius out from behind the curtain before Hamlet stabs him. One of my colleagues was disappointed that we couldn't "exit, pursued by the" bear we'd encountered.

(The bear didn't even try to attack us, though we did face an angry cow at one point. And badgers. So many badgers.)

I have more to say about this in relation to other Shakespeare "gaming experiences," but it's going into an article / dissertation chapter, which means it won't be posted here. As always, I'm very self-plagiarism-phobic.

Arden is an ambitious and exciting project, and I look forward to seeing what the team does with the next round. Meantime, don't wander off the beaten (primrose?) path late at night, lest you be attacked by angry Early Modern badgers!