Content area
Full Text
SINCE 2008, WHEN MICHAEL BEST surveyed the field of Shakespeare video games and reported just a handful of fairly unsuccessful experiments at the border between Shakespeare education and gaming entertainment, the field of Shakespeare gaming has exploded.1 There are currently dozens of video as well as board and card games about Shakespeare's life, drama, and theatrical culture. Although very few scholars have paid much attention to them, they are worth closer analysis not only for scholars of adaptation studies and popular culture, but also for scholars of drama, theater history, and performance.2 To be sure, most games simply trade on the bard's cultural iconicity, using theater to sell games (or products advertised on free gaming Web sites), but increasingly theater proponents have reversed this strategy, using games to sell theater. In addition to the many commercial games available for personal computers, smartphones, and iPads, games have emerged on the Web sites of esteemed heritage institutions for Shakespeare, including the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario and Shakespeare's Globe theater in London.3
Whether driven by financial profits or a mission to keep the classics alive (or both), Shakespeare-themed games aspire to have cultural impact and arguably have a good chance of doing so. As they expose a broader public to Shakespeare theater, they hold out the hope of luring a younger, hipper set into patronizing the theater arts by making uninitiated audiences more comfortable with Shakespeare's plays and theatrical performance in general. But what can games do for Shakespearean theater that it cannot do for itself? Insofar as many Shakespeare consumers tend to think of the plays as hallowed artistic objects to be watched quietly and respectfully, theater-themed games can leverage the interactivity of gaming to draw out the interactive qualities of Shakespeare's plays. They can turn Shakespearean theater into (or reveal that it already is) a game audiences might play. Surprisingly, few games actually manage this feat, however, and my essay explores why certain games struggle more than others to translate the phenomenology of theater into gaming.
I focus on a genre of theater-themed games that ought to be well poised to simulate and express the interactivity of theatrical performance: games that turn their players into creators of theater (actors, dramatists, theater managers, or designers)....