That’s one mighty big book.
Month: October 2006
Forsooth! A video game based on the works of Shakespeare?
On Thursday, the MacArthur Foundation is expected to announce a $240,000 grant to Castronova and his team to build “Arden: The World of Shakespeare,” a massively multiplayer online game, or MMO, built entirely around the plays of the Bard.
[snip]
Castronova likens “Arden” to a “petri dish” where he and other researchers can conduct ongoing social-science experiments. He said the idea is similar to a biologist running multiple versions of an experiment, each with slight variations in conditions, to see how those conditions affect the outcome.
“Now we have this technology for making little pocket societies and we can do different governments, different economies, different social norms in the different environments,” he said, “and see how it affects the things we care about, like equality and justice and growth and efficiency.”
Via Boing Boing.
It’s a really intriguing concept for a multiplayer universe, but will people actually want to play this thing? Because I’m guessing that, ultimately, will be the real question. Are there gamers who know there Shakespeare well enough to make head or tail of something like this? Or is there a contingent of Bard scholars who have just been waiting around for somebody to invent a game like this? I’m neither a gamer nor exceptionally well read when it comes to Shakespeare, but I have serious doubts.
Still, in the meantime, there’s always Hamlet: the Text Adventure (or at least there will be, when and if that site returns. How long’s it been gone? I wonder.)
And, speaking of text adventures…Pong. Via Backwards City.
All things being equal, I think I’d rather have been in Texas this week. The coworkers who went seemed disappointed they weren’t going instead to San Diego, which is next week’s conference.
The problem with ideology is if you got an ideology, you already got your mind made up, you know all the answers, and that makes evidence irrelevant and argument a waste of time, so you tend to govern by assertion and attack. The problem with that is that discourages thinking and gives you bad results. This new Bob Woodward book, “State of Denial,” is well named, but I think it’s important to point out that if you are an ideologue, denial is an essential part of your political being, whichever side. Listen to me. You’ve got to — because if you’re an ideologue, you’ve got your mind made up. So when an inconvenient pops up, you have to be in denial. It has to be a less significant fact.
As Waxy.org notes, “once upon a time, we had a coherent, thoughtful President.”
If there’s any justice in the universe, we will again someday.
“Go, my songs, to the lonely and the unsatisfied,
Go also to the nerve-racked, go to the enslaved-by-convention,
Bear to them my contempt for their oppressors.”
– Ezra Pound
And the band begins to play
“Yellow Submarine” by the Beatles, guessed by BettyScarlet billows start to spread
“Mack the Knife” by Bobby Darin, guessed by Kim- You spurn my natural emotions
“Ever Fallen in Love” by Nouvelle Vague (orig. Buzzcocks) Then I think I’ll study criminal law
“I’m Gonna Always Love You” from The Muppets Take Manhattan, guessed by Kim- Nrsingadeva Jaya Nrsingadeva
“Govinda” by Kula Shaker - The police are gonna hafta come and get me
“Straight Outta Compton” by Nina Gordon (orig. N.W.A.) I forget the movie song
“Romeo and Juliet” by Dire Straits, guessed by SharonBe one of the comfortable people“Welcome” by the Who, guessed by Betty and KimIt’s not the way you smile that touched my heart
“Baby It’s You” by the Shirelles (or the Beatles), guessed by KimFish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high
“Summertime” by Ella Fitzgerald (or others), guessed by RichterCa
It’s the Friday Random Guess 10. See last week’s for tips on how it’s not done. (Were they really that obscure?) Anyway, best of luck!