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(305) Naught's Had, All's Spent: ARDEN's Failure and the Challenges of Literature Videogames
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ARDEN: THE WORLD OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE at Indiana University was perceived by its own creator, Edward Castronova, as a failure as a serious game. Yet the lessons that could have been learned from the difficult challenge of attempting to adapt a group of literary works to a videogame genre were largely ignored, both in the media coverage and the scholarly publications that attempted to make sense of the game's legacy. This presentation looks at ARDEN in the context of other Shakespeare games and in relation to literary games more generally. On October 2, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that the MacArthur Foundation was pulling out of an ambitious plan for a multiplayer game that would teach digitally savvy students by presenting Shakespeare's works in a 3D virtual world full of opportunities for interactivity. After the MacArthur Foundation refused to renew funding for ARDEN, the director of the project issued a public mea culpa about the project's failure on a prominent collaboratively written blog about virtual worlds. As a political economist, who had studied massively multiplayer online role-playing games, he had hoped to use ARDEN as a social laboratory to test different economic models and to find insights into the way that money worked in the real world. Unfortunately, as Edward Castronova explained his diagnosis of the failure, his game's function as an economic simulation was insufficient to justify its existence. He summed up his perspective on the problem simply: It's no fun . . . You need puzzles and monsters. Obviously, ARDEN raised many organizational and managerial issues about the limits of the expertise of the university, play's relationship to philanthropy, and the circulation of units of value in real and virtual worlds, but this failure also bears on philosophical questions about game design, particularly those related to the principles governing the adaptation of literary works. Furthermore, for some working on ARDEN, videogames were seen primarily as representations of dramatic action that featured characters, settings, and plots. For others, videogames were experiences that involved interacting with rules. Those who focused on questions of aesthetics viewed the game's pedagogical mission one way, while those who focused on ethics viewed it in another. This talk looks at this self-described failure and what the principal investigator has characterized as a fundamental conflict between the game's pedagogical objectives and fun. It argues that the learning vs. fun dichotomy is only one way to think about the basic questions about game design raised by ARDEN: THE WORLD OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE and by educational videogames more generally, particularly those that aim to adapt literary texts.

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