The Play's the Thing: The Arden Project and the

Dilemmas of the Serious Games Movement

Elizabeth LoshUniversity of California, Irvine

Arden at Indiana University

A $240,000 grant from the MacArthur FoundationAnnounced in October 2006

The initial blog entry on Terra Nova “It's been a bumpy road. We've learned lots of lessons,

mostly that this is very hard to do, and especially hard to do in an academic context. I have new layers of respect for the world-builders out there.

What now? Work continues, with an uncertain time frame. I really enjoy writing systems in NWN Script, so I will keep tinkering. But - there's no telling when there will be anything to report. Based on the current direction and progress of the project, I should downplay expectations. Think "small Dungeons-and-Dragons world with a Shakespeare layer," not "World of Warcraft but with Hamlet." When we have built a small world that people like to play in, we will do some experiments. Small, limited objectives. The bigger objectives of the Arden project are on indefinite hold.” 

Scrolling down

“You're all correct in guessing that there's more to the story. I made some awful mistakes as a manager, which I don't hesitate to admit because, well, I am not a manager. And the project wasn't funded at a level where hiring a manager was feasible. As manager, I did a lot of stupid things.” 

And down

“[T]he object is and remains to do experiments. Emphasizing Shakespeare was a mistake. The burdens of a license! Everyone thought it was World of Hamlet and the point was to teach high school kids 2B|~2B. But teaching Shakespeare has always been an ancillary benefit, not the point. I thought it would be cute. But putting Shakespeare in the game, I found, took away resources from fun. Lore, by itself, did not make a fun game. Shakespeare also loaded us up with an entire community of expectations, people who dig the idea of a digital Shakespeare.”

The Postmorten in Technology Reviewappears in The Chronicle of Higher

Education

“You need puzzles and monsters,” he says, “or people won’t want to play. ... Since what I really need is a world with lots of players in it for me to run experiments on, I decided I needed a completely different approach.”

‘Speare

Prospero’s Island

Orson Welles and Chimes at Midnight

Hazlitt’s Prohibition

The Multiverse Plan

What’s in a Game Engine?Revolution and Neverwinter Nights

Why these avatars?

Why not these avatars?

Hegelian Contingency

Why druids and ogres?Why not witches and ghosts?

What are the rule sets of Shakespeare?

Rule Sets Shakespeare Seems to ViolateThe UnitiesUnity of actionUnity of placeUnity of time

Rules about representation

Other endings to his King LearAnd other endings in Arden with MacDuff going to

England

Shakespeare Mash-Ups and Game Mash-Ups “There were a few MMO junkies on the team. The lead

programmer is a HUGE fan of Final Fantasy XI. I really can’t stress how infatuated he is with that game. The lead designer and the project manager are both fans of EQ2. The rest of us play a hodgepodge of MMOs. I tried a few different games but I eventually settled on Lord of the Rings Online. I can’t say that there was a single favorite amongst all of us.

I think that EQ2 had a bit of an influence on Arden. Like EQ2, Arden had an immensely complex crafting system.”

Questions about Adaptation

Do games need to have the same stories or characters as the original sources?

Could a game be about a counternarrative that is repressed in the original work or a seemingly marginalized character?

Could the rhetorical purpose of the work of literature be better accomplished in a game through other means?

How do you adapt a rule-based procedural logic or ideology to a different genre?

To what extent do literary experiences imply winning or losing?

Ian Bogost and the Translation metaphor

A role for Comparative LiteratureGDC 2005

Translating Games to Videogames

Rule sets as integral to game play

Programming and Play

Other StagingsThe Globe in Second Life