Arden: The World of Shakespeare

Edward Castronovo, a prof at Indiana University at Bloomington, is creating a serious role-playing game called "Arden: The World of Shakespeare". This is a very cool project, and a long-time coming given how many role-playing games already exist for entertainment but how slow universities have been to jump on the bandwagon and to appropriate this technology as a pedagogical tool. A brief story on this was writen in The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the original interview with Prof Castronovo is over at CNET. Here's a brief excerpt:

On Thursday, the MacArthur Foundation is announcing a $240,000 grant to Edward Castronova for his online game, "Arden: The World of Shakespeare."

The idea behind the project is to produce a virtual world steeped in the rich lore and characters of the playwright's work.

But Castronova--an Indiana University associate professor of telecommunications best-known as the world's leading expert on the economies of virtual worlds and massively multiplayer online games--sees his initiative as far more than just a historical adaptation of the Bard's work. He looks at it as a way to teach students about Shakespeare's life, times and writing, as well as a way to conduct innovative social-science research.