"Praising what is lost," Shakespeare once wrote, "makes the remembrance dear." Recapturing what is lost might be even sweeter, though, at least for Edward Castronova, an associate professor of telecommunications at Indiana University at Bloomington.
Mr. Castronova, an expert on the economics of online gaming (The Chronicle, August 1, 2005), received a $240,000 grant yesterday from the MacArthur Foundation to develop a game called Arden: The World of Shakespeare. It should bear a resemblance to virtual worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft, but it will be populated by Elizabethan characters instead of fanciful avatars.
"Video-game companies make these worlds where millions of people get together online to encounter orcs and dragons," says Mr. Castronova. "Why not Shakespeare? He's just as fun, and better for the soul."
The professor offered more details about the Arden project in an interview this week with CNET News. –Brock Read
2 Responses to Gaming With the Bard
22215614 - February 28, 2012 at 12:01 pm
Very interesting. Thanks for this, I enjoyed learning something different today.
jffoster - February 28, 2012 at 1:24 pm
Readers might want to have a look at the following:
Hine, Thomas
1999 The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager.: A New History of the American Adolescent Experience. NY: Harper Collins (Perennial).
cf. also some of the writings of Richard Hofstadter (I may have misspelled this.) on the extension of child labor laws and of compulsory school attendance laws and the rise of organized labor.
We got teenagers from adolescents because we needed em. I.e. we needed an age cohort range to lump youths into when we could not (any longer) allow them to enter or find a use for them in the labor force. Note now in many universities the cadre of adolescence – prolonging administrators and administratresses we have — Obama is trying to extend the school leaving laws and universities and colleges have to be made coddlling, cosseting, and attractive to late teens / early adults many of whom would really rather not be there because we don’t know what else to do with them.