Virtual Shakespeare

Shakespeare has a very rich lore and fantasy environment second only to Tolkien, . . . Both have elves.

Professor Edward Castronova and colleagues in the Synthetic Worlds Institute at the University of Indiana have built a virtual gameworld - Arden - around the Shakespeare's plays.

Lest you mistake Arden for just another virtual game:

An economist by training, Prof Castronova has led attempts to quantify the economic activity and impact of virtual worlds - be that in the games themselves or in the real world when people pay cold cash for virtual goods.

Arden, said Prof Castronova, was an attempt to go much further than this after the fact analysis. It will give social scientists an entire populated world on which to perform experiments - something always lacking in the real world.

"We're interested in social dynamics and economics," he said.

Read: The Bard Helps Digital Experiment