Primrose Road

HyperHamlet is up and running. I saw an early version of this project presented at a conference in 2006, and its aims remain the same: it doesn't attempt to supply an edition in the sense of an editorial reconstruction, and it doesn't want to work backwards from the text. Instead, the project seeks to map the text forward, cataloguing references to Hamlet from all walks of life and culture.

When I first heard about the project, I asked myself what cataloguing every reference to Hamlet ever could do for us. Interestingly, the project page now explains that such an endeavor can serve as not only a research database but also as a means of questioning the point of bookish editorial reconstructions.


* Hattip to Shakespeare Geek, who found this before I did. *

According to Wired (which incidentally this month also declared THE END OF THEORY!!!111!!5!!#1!!), there's a game/SIM called Zero Hour: America's Medic which is being used to train paramedics in disaster response. Basically, paramedics get immersed in one of three situations: an unusual flu breaks out at an apartment building, a possibly radioactive bomb explodes at a baseball stadium, and finally (here I'll quote the item) "a freight train has derailed at a downtown station during rush hour, spewing lethal chemicals into the air." Other people realize what's kind of funny about that last one, right?

Meanwhile, I do like the idea of computers that can think better than humans do, because they can serve to remind us humanpeople that thinking isn't supernatural or preternatural.

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."

Did anybody else catch last night's performance of Act I, Scene I of Hamlet in Second Life? I don't regularly "play" Second Life (way too much to manage in Life #1), but since I'm writing a dissertation on Early Modern drama and new media, I had to check this performance out.

(Hat tip to Intute Arts and Humanities Blog for sending this one our way.)

Convergence, convergence, convergence: Second Life avatars on a virtual stage playing for an audience of actors in a fairly accurate-looking replica of the Globe theater with an interface that permits users to view the scenes from a variety of "movie camera" angles.

A fellow audience member brought up an interesting logistical issue: performances should have taken place during the day, as they did in the "first life" Globe. Without any "natural" lighting (and despite the full moon), the area was somewhat difficult to navigate.

They have a slew of performances going on this week and next in case you want to take your avatar out for some Shakespearin'.

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!

Most arguments against new media have already been made by either the Unabomber or Plato.

"The FBI hunts down the most vicious criminals online," reads a half-page ad for the new thriller Untraceable, "but the most dangerous one is hunting them."

I'll bet that in the world of American crime thrillers, the FBI hunts down criminals via Google searches.

According to film and television, any and all information is available to us with a web browser and a couple of clever keystrokes. Computers never fail, except when they explode. On police/courtroom procedural dramas, often all it takes to catch a criminal is a simple search of a database of fingerprints, which never fails. And somehow, TV's fictional rendering of the Manhattan Special Victims Unit (Law and Order: SVU) is outfitted with gigantic hi-def flat screens that display information relevant to the case (a function served by simple marker-boards on the other two Law and Order series). Lawyers and court employees involved in jury selection have to worry about the CSI Effect because of the widespread belief that when it comes to criminal investigation, computers can do just about anything.

No wonder today's college students think that Google and Wikipedia are all-powerful.

A paragraph from (my) essay about how various new media educational resources attempt to recast interactivity as immersion:

The view of hypertext as a “writerly” medium may in itself be limited. First, it views interactivity as the key to hypertext’s potential. Lev Manovich notes that in an environment centered on a human-computer interface, interactivity is not a new development but rather a “tautology” (Manovich 55); hypertext and computer-based media are by definition interactive. And even if we label interactivity a non-necessity, it seems overly optimistic to view the intersection of interactivity and user control as a place for democracy, new economic models, new forms of publishing, and more effective teaching and learning methods.

The essay itself focuses on digital performances of Shakespeare and friends and the "more effective teaching and learning methods" part of the last clause of the paragraph above. Here, I'd like to examine the "new forms of publishing" aspect of the false promises attached to interactivity and user control.

New media communication does seem to promise (re)new(ed) forms of printing and publishing (blogging: the new pamphleteering?), but it also provides an ideal arena for scammers. Print-on-demand, which is not in itself a scam -- it actually works well for small presses who are genuinely trying to help new authors, and for non-scammish subsidy printers like iUniverse -- has unfortunately made it much easier for vanity presses to present themselves as legitimate publishers, because they can charge the author nothing and yet still take the author's money.

Publishers are supposed to invest in authors because they make money from book sales to book buyers and libraries, not from the authors themselves. If cash flows away from the author, then you're looking at a scam. But before print-on-demand and the World Wide Web, it was to some degree easier to identify these scams, because most writers would find any unheard-of company charging a $700 "setup" fee to be quite suspicious. Now, companies like PublishAmerica (link is to a critical Publishers Weekly article) can present themselves on their website as "traditional publishers" (their phrase) and even offer their clients a $1 advance because of print-on-demand technologies. Yet, money still flows away from the author: PA does not handle promotion as a "traditional publisher" would, does not invest the time and money to edit its books (remember that real editing involves much more than proofreading), and even encourages its authors to buy their own books as a means of promotion.

If we ignore the "traditional publisher" claims, we still cannot claim that PA is just a printing business. PA sends "acceptance letters" to authors who submit manuscripts; yet, as several sting operations have demonstrated, PA accepts virtually all manuscripts submitted. In this manner, it's no better than the International Library of Poetry, the perennial scam that praises entrants' poems and then encourages them to buy books, plaques, and mugs.

One incredibly disconcerting aspect of PA is that they take advantage of children and teenagers, convincing young people that their juvenilia is publication-worthy. I won't link to those books because I don't want to criticize young people who have been taken in by the scam.

Bloggers like literary agent Victoria Strauss have already written excellent exposés on PublishAmerica. For even more information on the scam, refer to Strauss' Writer Beware site and the Preditors and Editors entry for PA. Fortunately, while new technologies have allowed the PA scam to develop and grow, the Internet has at the same time served as an excellent forum for warning potential scam victims: despite PA's alleged cybersquatting practices, thirteen of the first twenty Google results for "PublishAmerica" are sites critical of the company.

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."

Castronova's concern is that they "failed to design a gripping game experience." If players are not immersed in the world of Shakespeare, then it seems that, in light of the Synthetic Worlds Initiative's ideas about learning-via-immersion, the developers still have some work to do. However, when I read about the immersive promises of new media performances (and games), I cannot help but hear echoes of literary critic Catherine Belsey’s recounting a visit to Llancaich Fawr, a “living history museum” in which actors play the roles of seventeenth-century residents of the manor house in order to teach and entertain present-day tourists. Belsey understandably finds it difficult to intellectualize from the “living history” perspective; one cannot interrogate the past while participating or pretending to participate in it.

I'm not going to go into this any further because I'm developing an article/dissertation chapter on the problems with recasting interactivity as immersion, and don't want to, y'know, plagiarize myself. Next week (a non-grading week before final papers come in!) I'll see if I can borrow a friend's PC in order to actually play Arden, and I'll report back then.

Some days, I forget I'm back in New York City.

The Wooster Group's Hamlet is currently on stage at the Public Theater this month, and Newsday's review has me excited about this production, which projects a film of a 1964 stage production on a screen behind the actors. And,

"The synchronization of stage to film is maniacally precise: The stage actors move themselves, and some free-wheeling set pieces, in tandem not only with the film actors' blocking but with camera movements, cuts and snags in the film.

Some of these visual blips have been added. The film of Burton's "Hamlet," already a low-quality live recording of a starkly casual production, has been sliced and diced to a jerky, idiosyncratic rhythm. Actors' bodies have been digitally erased, or half-erased, from many shots. And a few other "Hamlet" films - Kenneth Branagh's, Michael Almereyda's - make cameo appearances."

Employing film to produce "jerky, idiosyncratic rhythm" on stage -- characters from Hamlet shouting "fast forward!" -- Hamlet speaking "like an obsessive who's replayed the same scene over and over again on his VCR" ... I'm definitely going to have to go see this one by myself, because no one wants to sit with the woman taking notes in the theater.

I will blog a review of this and Lincoln Center's Cymbeline, which I will be seeing with people (thus, not taking notes) in late November or early December.