The Play's the Thing: The Arden Project and the Dilemmas of the Serious Games Movement

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The Play's the Thing The Arden Project and the
Dilemmas of the Serious Games Movement

• Elizabeth Losh
• University of California, Irvine

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Arden at Indiana University
A 240,000 grant from the MacArthur
Foundation Announced in October 2006
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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. 

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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. 

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And down

• The 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 2B2B. 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.

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The Postmorten in Technology Reviewappears in
The Chronicle of Higher Education

• You need puzzles and monsters, he says, or
  people wont 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.

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Speare
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Prosperos Island
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Orson Welles and Chimes at Midnight
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Hazlitts Prohibition
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The Multiverse Plan
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Whats in a Game Engine?Revolution and
Neverwinter Nights
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Why these avatars?
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Why not these avatars?
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Hegelian Contingency

• Why druids and ogres?
• Why not witches and ghosts?

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What are the rule sets of Shakespeare?Rule Sets
Shakespeare Seems to Violate

• The Unities
• Unity of action
• Unity of place
• Unity of time
• Rules about representation
• Other endings to his King Lear
• And other endings in Arden with MacDuff going to
  England

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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 cant 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 cant 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.

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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?

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Ian Bogost and the Translation metaphor

• A role for Comparative Literature
• GDC 2005

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Translating Games to Videogames
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Rule sets as integral to game play

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Programming and Play
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Other StagingsThe Globe in Second Life
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