Transcript Blogspats” and Digital Images: Race, Sex, and Photoshop in

The Play’s the Thing:
The Arden “Failure” and the
Future of the Educational
Games Movement
Elizabeth Losh
University of California, Irvine
Searching for failure case studies
Failures of criticism
More failures of criticism
Beyond failures of budget
McKenzie Wark’s
perspective on
“God’s suicide” in
GAM3R 7H3ORY
Beyond failures of usability
Design Failures as Rhetorical Failures
Arden at Indiana University
A $240,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation
announced in October 2006
On October 2, 2007 the Chronicle of Higher Education
announces the foundation has pulled out
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.”
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.”
And down
“[T]he 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 2B|~2B. 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.”
The postmortem in Technology Review
appears in The Chronicle of Higher
Education
“You need puzzles and monsters,” he says, “or
people won’t 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.”
Not Yet Shakespeare
‘Speare
Prospero’s Island
A history of disastrous Shakespeare
adaptations
Orson Welles and Chimes at Midnight
Hazlitt’s Prohibition
Failures of “authenticity” or “integrity”:
mash-up madness
“There were a few MMO junkies on the team. The
lead programmer is a HUGE fan of Final Fantasy
XI. I really can’t 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 can’t 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.”
The Multiverse Plan
The Neverwinter Nights Plan
What’s in a Game Engine?
Revolution and Neverwinter Nights
Why these avatars?
Why not these avatars?
Contingency
Why druids and ogres?
Why not witches and ghosts?
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 in his sources and
subsequent stagings.
And other endings in Arden with MacDuff going to
England
Ian Bogost on Translation and Adaptation
A role for Comparative Literature
GDC 2005
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?
Rule sets as integral to game play
Programming and Play
Other Stagings
The Rhetoric of Recuperation
“Our experimental question (kept secret
up to now) was: Are fantasy game players
economically “normal”? Or on the
contrary, when they make themselves into
elves and dwarves and hobbits, do they
stop taking economic decisions seriously?”
Published as: “A Test of the Law of
Demand in a Virtual World: Exploring the
Petri Dish Approach to Social Science”
Scaling Back
Original Plan: 500 people to play for 100
hours per month each
Actual Test Group: 43 players, recruited
from undergraduate classes, who clocked
10 to 12 hours
Another Arden in the Making?