As we move further into the twenty-first century, we continue to witness that, “[w]hen innovative communication platforms emerge, new Shakespeare use appears almost on point with the arrival of the new medium.” However, the appearance of new uses of Shakespeare does not always culminate in a critical mass that runs parallel to the spread of a new medium. Such is the case with videogames—a medium over 60 years old—to which Shakespeare studies has only begun to turn its attention. Though some Shakespeareans may be familiar with older titles such as Ted Castranova’s Arden (2008), Charles Crayne's Castle Elsinore (1983), or EMME Interactive’s almost impossible to obtain Hamlet: A Murder Mystery (1997), over the past decade we have witnessed a minor explosion in the number of Shakespearebased videogames. Recently, Shakespeare's plays have been adapted into videogames such as Romeo and Juliet- and Tempest-inspired games in the Globe Playground section of the Shakespeare's Globe website; Golden Glitch Studios’ Elsinore (2019), in which the player enters the fictional world of Hamlet by controlling a time-looping Ophelia in an attempt to “prevent the tragedy that lies before her”; and the two games that are the focus of this essay, Alawar's Hamlet, or The Last Game without MMORPG Features, Shaders and Product Placement (2010) and Tin Man Games’ To Be or Not to Be (2015). Videogames thrive on the interactivity between the game and the player, and as such, they present an opportunity to rethink our approaches to studying Shakespearean adaptation and appropriation. Shakespeare-based videogames reveal a collaborative process of creation and reception that evolves from players interacting with creators’ embedded narratives to creating new narrative experiences rooted as much (if not more than) in videogames as in Shakespeare.

A central tenet of the corporatism literature is that the Phillips curve trade-off between inflation and unemployment is mitigated in countries with powerful and centrally coordinated organized labor movements. Most empirical studies, however, are based on data about labor market institutions from the early 1970s and refer to macroeconomic outcomes in the decade following the first OPEC oil shock in 1973. Recent case studies, in contrast, suggest that corporatism broke down during the 1980s in its Scandinavian bastions, in a cycle of strikes, inflation, and ultimately higher unemployment (Iversen 1996; Pontusson and Swenson 1996). We argue that one important reason for the apparent economic problems of strong labor regimes in recent years has been the growth of publicsector unions. So long as public-sector unions are not “too strong” (this limit is estimated empirically), corporatist institutions continue to promote both price stability and low rates of unemployment.

Encompassing labor movements - those that cover large sections of the work force in a relatively small number of independent unions and in which authority is concentrated in the hands of leaders of a single trade union confederation — provide an organizational structure that is conducive to low inflation and low unemployment because they mitigate distributional conflict among all workers. There is a limit, however, to the ability of encompassing labor movements to perform this role. Where public-sector unions are extremely strong (as has recently been the case in Scandinavia), confederation leaders cannot stop public-sector workers from using their organizational power to bid up their wages to levels that have deleterious consequences for the private sector - and especially for those industries that are exposed to international trade.

This chapter relies on three recent systematic studies of labor movements in Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD) countries that allow us to test the labor market institutions-performance nexus more precisely than has hitherto been the case. We use Visser's (1991) data on publicsector unions, Golden and Wallerstein's (1995) analysis of the structural attributes of organized labor movements, and Traxler's (1994) study of the coverage of collectively bargained wage contracts. These data sources allow us to construct time-sensitive measures of theoretically important attributes of organized labor movements.