The problem with Shakespeare in games: there ain't enough monsters and puzzles, man

Plans to build a multiplayer game about Shakespeare have hit an obstacle: the Bard wrote plays, not gameplays

Seemed like a good idea: if you can't get the kids to read Shakespeare's works, get them to play them. As virtual worlds.

And so in October 2006 Edward Castronova was given a $240,000 grant by the MacArthur Foundation to build a virtual world with Shakespeare's works. The first, he said, would be built around Richard III:

It's a story that has lots and lots of secret conniving and deal-making and battles and political intrigue. And it's historical, so that means it's really easy for us to take all the (usual) fantasy (game) stuff like knights in shining armor and peasants and woodworkers and they just fit right into "Richard III" right away. The way we envision it is once you get this thing going, I'll have another crop of students come in and say, "OK, what play are we doing this year?" And we'll say, "Well, let's do a post-apocalyptic 'Macbeth.'"

There was even going to be an in-world currency:

It's going to be the Old English currency, which will be kind of cumbersome to learn. But you'll learn something about what it was like, so when you see a Shakespeare play and they talk about money, you'll have a clue what they're talking about. But we're going to start with a crafting economy: resources and harvesting and things like that.

(Thinks: hmm, I'm sure people would love a virtual world where they're counting in groats, and you have to multiply by 12 and 20 to make up units.)

So Castronova and the team got to work and built the virtual world, called Arden.

Unfortunately, while you might think that where there's a Will there's a play, it hasn't worked out. Technology Review explains:


But Castronova says that there's a problem with the game: "It's no fun." While focusing on including references to the bard, he says, his team ended up sidelining some of the fundamental features of a game. "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."

Puzzles? Monsters? Come on, there's the Tempest, isn't there, which has a monster (of sorts. Well..) Puzzles? Er, Twelfth Night involves trying to work out what gender other characters are, which is a pretty common problem in virtual worlds, surely? And there's murders aplenty, with loads of slitting from knave to chops - good grief, you'd think he'd get an 18 for Hitman:Macbeth.

Come on - how should he have done it? Was the mistake in letting people know they were in Shakespearean plots? And could games companies um, borrow a few plots for some new games? (You could be the dithering hero in Hamlet..)

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