Primrose Road

FYI: There's a short writeup on the Arden project in this month's Wired, which includes "Ted Castronova's 5 Tips for Making Games That Don't Suck."

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."

Mark Anderson, author of "Shakespeare" by Another Name, an Oxfordian biography of Shakespeare (or Shakespearean biography of Oxford?), references Indiana University's Arden Project on his blog this week:

As this month's Technology Review reports, a $250,000 project (funded by the MacArthur Foundation) to adapt the Shakespeare canon into a multiplayer video game has ended in failure. "Arden"'s founder, Edward Castronova, told TR that the problem was simple. "It's no fun," he said.

I've never designed a video game before, so I'm sure there are complexities here that I'm missing out on. But if all that we have of "Shakespeare" is a practically random assortment of plays and poems, without a real, discernible human being that links them together, then it's no wonder "Arden" never took off. Here's a counter-proposal: The life story of the author "Shakespeare" and the works he produced are intimately and intricately interwoven. The reason 20,000 hours and $250,000 can't put "Shakespeare" back together again is the same reason American and British publishers have pumped out some 20 traditional Shakespeare biographies in the past decade alone.

Arden I: The World of William Shakespeare, a virtual-world Shakespeare game, is now available for download. According to Edward Castronova's Terra Nova blog, the game, which is set in a Richard II universe, includes

"Shakespearean quest lines; historically accurate tavern games; NPCs and resources drawn from Shakespeare; Shakespeare Q&A games that give experience points; Shakespeare text objects that grant power (text-as-treasure); Shakespeare texts accessed verbatim, in summary, and in quest/plot form."

Even though I'm not sure how well "immersive" technologies work for teaching students about Early Modern theatre and culture, I was disappointed to learn that the Arden Project is out of funding (for now). It seems, however, that there might be a promise of another MacArthur grant: Edward Castronova, who heads up the project, writes that "the basic objective has been to revolutionize social science by introducing controlled experimentation at the macro level." I'm looking forward to learning what becomes of this project. And, of course, I want to play with it. Hat tip to Shakespeare Geek, who got to this story first.

I'm in the process of collecting my thoughts for a proposed essay on "immersive" new media technologies and Shakespeare studies. I'll most likely post some of these thoughts once I've actually responded to the call for papers with a full abstract. Basically, the essay will consist of my usual shpiel about how when we're talking theater/performance, immersion may be one of the less promising aspects of this decade's computer culture. Brecht believed that audiences couldn't intellectualize if they were forced to identify with the characters on stage; in a role-playing game that takes place in a detailed "world," it seems, audience and actor/character are irreducibly connected. It may be a while before I have all my thoughts together on this, since I've been ordered to avoid caffeine for the next few months (conveniently, until the last part of my qualifying exams is complete!). So far, I'm not operating at 1000%, as was evidenced when I struggled to spell "verisimilitude" on the blackboard. (My students are probably going to spell that word wrong for the rest of their lives now. Alas.) Getting back to business (not really), the FAQ for the Arden: The World of William Shakespeare project (part of the Synthetic Worlds Initiative at Indiana University) is an informative and entertaining read -- it has a few not-so-frequently-asked questions thrown in --

"35. Will there be fireballs and levitation? No. There is no elemental magic in Shakespeare."