I’ve read pretty mixed things about this second season of Doctor Who, and so far they’ve proved mostly accurate, but I do want to say this one thing, having just now watched it: “The Girl in the Fireplace” is pretty fantastic television.
Day: October 21, 2006
That’s one mighty big book.
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.