Virtual World As Social Experiment

Shakespeare add-on to NeverWinter Nights becomes an academic social experiment.

Academia and commerce can make odd bedfellows, but they’re coming together with the game Arden. It’s a virtual world created as asocial experiment by Professor Edward Castronova and a team the Synthetic Worlds Institute at the University of Indiana. At present it’s a prototypeto experiment with social theories. What makes it particularly unusual is that it’s a downloadable add-on to the Bioware game NeverWinter Nights –indeed, you have to own to game to get the add-on.   The idea is that in Arden, a world inspired by Shakespeare, social scientists could play with conditions, sometimes in obvious, sometimes insubtle, ways.   "I have seen nothing in virtual worlds that violates any social theory I know about," said Prof. Castronova, who trained as an economist, told the BBC. "A marketis a market whether it is in ancient Athens, Shakespeare’s London or Azeroth. If you have a theory about human society and it does not survive the transition across the membrane to a virtual worldthen it’s not a very interesting theory."   Visitors to the world carry out quests, and they’ll find it all authentically Shakespearian, but perhaps lacking in the pleasures gamerstraditionally enjoy – which is why Arden II is now being planned in the hope of engaging more people.