Primrose Road

I've been looking at Shakespeare-inspired card and board games during my time at the Folger (there's *really* not that much for a new media person to do in the archives, though, contrary to popular belief, I do read and make use of Early Modern documents); the games will allow me to at least contextualize some of my work on how very un-new and unexciting "interactivity" is. Saturday morning (yep, I spend Saturday mornings in the li-berry this term), I looked at a card game from 1900 and a checkers game from 1865. Since I'm most likely not going to write about the card game (and therefore don't have to worry about self-plagiarism), I wanted to share some of the rather hilarious (and sometimes justalittle blatantly racist, sexist, and/or essentialist) questions posed to game players. If you answer all of them correctly, you win either $5000 in chips from the Atlantic City casino of your choice, a batch of mascarpone brownies, a "Fight Sexism" Purim gragger, or absolutely nothing, depending on my mood. Questions are all taken from "The Study of Shakespeare: An Instructive Game" (Camden, Maine: Shakespeare Club, c. 1900). 1. What is the name of a savage and deformed slave? 2. What is the sweetest and happiest of all Shakespeare's comedies? 3. Who was a genius without moral fiber? 4. Who was one of the most fascinating women in the world? 5. Who fell in a brook accidentally and was drowned? (Easy one, but I thought it was funny that they totally ignored the whole discussion about whether or not she deserved a Christian burial.) 6. What play may America claim as suggesting and shaping? 7. Who possessed those winning ways that give the weaker half of mankind so much influence for good and evil over the stronger?

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."

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.