Naughts Had, All’s Spent: The Arden Failure and the Challenges of Literature Videogames Elizabeth Losh University of California, Irvine.
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Naughts Had, All’s Spent: The Arden Failure and the Challenges of Literature Videogames Elizabeth Losh University of California, Irvine a time for taking criticism seriously what if educational games are neither the best form of education nor the best form of games? looking at the data: Ute Ritterfeld how do serious games compare to learning materials that are supposed to be less interactive? looking at the history: Mimi Ito what assumptions are made by authority figures about educational games? looking at the ethics: Mia Consalvo why would players not cheat in an educational game? looking at the mechanics: Scot Osterweil how many educational games are weird hybrids like Osterweil’s imagined title Grand Theft Calculus? looking at the aesthetics the serious becomes trivial: Ian Bogost asserting that games are about literacy not knowledge transfer James Paul Gee, Henry Jenkins, Kurt Squire, and others have been careful to qualify their claims. what else makes discussion happen? searching for failure case studies beyond failures of usability being mindful of outsider hubris: some recent failures of game criticism a failure that actually used the “f-word” 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 obviously a rhetorical failure on several levels the initial blog entry on Terra Nova the rhetoric of lessons learned “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 worldbuilders out there.” the rhetoric of downsizing “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-andDragons 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 to self-criticism “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 to criticizing the feasibility of a Shakespeare game “[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.” Castronova’s postmortem in Technology Review “It’s no fun . . . You need puzzles and monsters . . . 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.” 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 in Arden II: London’s Burning 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 burning London and burning bridges: setting an anti-literature agenda in Wired “This is going to be a game about hitting rats, chasing down cockatrices. Some would say, What a waste of time. But I have no problem with it. I like ordinary gameplay. Human nature likes to hit rats more than it likes to read text. Why do we want to fight against what humans want to do?” three commonly uttered forms of received wisdom about Arden failures of experience: “They were theoreticians not practitioners. They were players not designers.” (from degree-granting universitybased game design programs) failures of budgeting: “They never had enough money for a project with so many technical challenges.” (from military-funded game development teams) failures of collegiality: “They ruined it for the rest of us.” (from those with their own educational projects in virtual worlds) all the king’s horses are these criticisms fair? is it possible to make a good Shakespeare game? is a Shakespeare game even a good idea? “not yet Shakespeare” Meaningful Play Conference, Richard Hilleman, October 9, 2008 ‘Speare Prospero’s Island a history of disastrous Shakespeare adaptations Orson Welles and Chimes at Midnight Hazlitt’s Prohibition is this a better map to Shakespeare? why do Shakespeareans find this form of play more appealing? play for fans vs. play for neophytes how well can other forms of computational media do the work of literature? Ian Bogost on translation and adaptation a role for comparative literature looking back to GDC 2005 Will Wright and others on the Emily Dickinson license some 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 purpose of a literary narrative or device be accomplished by other means? to what extent do literary experiences imply winning or losing? what’s the difference between fan fiction and adaptation? 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.” Arden 0: the Multiverse plan nine months of work Arden I: the Neverwinter Nights plan six weeks of work Revolution at MIT what’s in a Game Engine?: why settle for these avatars? why not these avatars? contingency in Shakespeare why druids and ogres? why not witches and ghosts? programming and play other stagings and improvisations “this is a fun game” what can be learned from the Arden experience?