The Ivory Tower

October 2004

From Middle-Earth to Arden

by Edward Castronova

The more I think about the life-work of J.R.R. Tolkien, the more impressed I am at its long run impact. His ideas have resonated from an entire genre of writing, to movies, to videogames, especially of the massively-multiplayer variety.

The last step seems puzzling to me, because it hasn't worked all that well. I've met many elves online, and very few are able to act like Tolkien's Elves, conceived as humans before the Fall. Middle-earth is so flush with larger-than-life heroes and villains that it can only be a poor template for a game with thousands of people drawn at random.

If immersion and role-playing are to happen naturally, the underlying lore ought to represent people just the way they are. Fortunately, there's a lore-maker who writes about people in just that way, and he remains untapped by any virtual world to date: William Shakespeare.

Tame, you say. Bookish. Will never sell with today's action-starved gaming masses.

Not so, say I. There's more gore in Richard III than Doom III ; the stage flows red throughout the play, two kids get smothered alive, and an army of undead wanders up at the end just to remind you how it all felt. Sir John Falstaff ( Henry IV ) would drink any of you under the table, steal everything you've got, and make you love him for it. Many of the plays conclude with huge battles. Tragedy, history, comedy: Shakespeare is more vulgar, more violent, and in fact far more brutally honest, than any games sitting on the shelves at your local Wal-Mart. If anything, the intensity level would have to be toned down for modern consumption. There's no question it could be fun .

What about immersive? Tolkien argued [“On Fairy Stories”, 1939] that drama was not a proper modality for the delivery of fantasy: you have to believe the actor before you can believe the world he is in, and that second layer of disbelief, not present in literature, prevents the viewer's immersion. And surely, if average people cannot play Elves, they certainly cannot play Hamlet.

Yet this overlooks the possibility that viewers, indeed a whole society, could become the actors. Not too many writers considered this, before the era of computer networks, anyway. But Shakespeare did.

Yes: Many of his plays consciously invoke the notion of virtuality. In As You Like It , folks escape to the Forest of Arden to change their social status, their names, even their sex, prompting the forest-philosopher Jacques to note that “all the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” Meanwhile, after The Tempest drops off some real-world folk on a mysterious isle where everything is different and magic is king, its owner declares that everything is an image, indeed, that “ we are such stuff as dreams are made on” (emphasis added). Macbeth sums up the absurdity of his situation by declaring “Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more.” Going the other way, Henry V 's Prologue wants to make a whole kingdom into a stage, so she can enact fake battles upon it. And poor Prince Hamlet spends a considerable amount of time working with actors who will play parts related to those being played by the real actors on the stage, a telescoping effect that, according to Shakespeare scholar Harold Bloom [Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human , chapter 23], gives you the overwhelming impression that Hamlet's principle suffering is not that he's got weird parental figures, but that he is a real person trapped inside a play .

All of these constructions make me think of avatars. That “real-guy-in-a-play” thing is the essence of the online experience. Going online makes everybody a Hamlet: it's not that we suddenly see the virtual world as so real, it's that we suddenly see the real world as so virtual, and the distinction vanishes. Voilà: immersion.

Shakespeare not only invokes the virtual, he makes an understanding of it into a very common human trait. Role-playing, he says, is natural, something we do without thinking about it. Nobody's really a hero or a villain. Therefore when we go onto the stage of the virtual world, we needn't expected to play a Hamlet, but rather just be a Hamlet, if that's who we are.

Once everyone is unconsciously role-playing, they can be embedded in Shakespeare's stories and plot lines, which are among the most engaging in world literature. Witness the hundreds of Shakespeare adaptations, from West Side Story to Kurosawa's Ran . They can also be seamlessly immersed in a world of magic, one much easier to implement sensibly than the usual fare. No fireballs here, just hallucinations, soothsayers, spells, and potions. There are witches, ghosts, spirits, or faeries, but are they real, or mere figments of someone's overactive imagination? The point is, it doesn't matter . Whether Macbeth saw witches, or visions of witches, he still wrote his wife that he dreamt of a crown, and all the rest follows.

As arguably the greatest writer in the history of the world, Shakespeare clearly deserves attention in our times. He ought to be read, but most people can't understand the language. And as technology continues to force reading to give way to interacting, there's a danger that this entire body of work might be lost to our consciousness.

Virtual worlds are the answer to both problems. Immerse people in a Shakespearean virtual world, and language will soon cease to be a barrier. Make comprehension of Shakespeare a valuable thing in that world – possible because a virtual world can create value out of nothing and assign it to anything – and the preservation of his work is assured.

If a Shakespeare virtual world did nothing more than make the Bard more widely understood, it would be worth every penny of its development cost. Implemented in a University context, however, such a world could also offer more. It could help students with the arduous labor of their own self-development. And it could provide teachers and researchers with a testbed society -- economy, government, public health, and more – within which they could hold all kinds of interesting exercises and experiments.

This idea really is a no-brainer, isn't it? Let's make it happen.

Arden: The World of William Shakespeare. Coming soon, unless fate o'er-rules.

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Edward Castronova
Edward Castronova is an Associate Professor of Telecommunications at Indiana University and contributes to Terra Nova, a group blog focused on MMOs and virtual worlds.