This chapter describes a collaboration between its authors – a professor and an undergraduate (post-secondary) student – to develop an education programme for Play the Knave, a mixed-reality digital Shakespeare game. As part of an effort to bring the game to local elementary and secondary school English classrooms, the authors co-ran an internship programme at our university, where the game was created. Interns, most of whom were English majors interested in education, learned to create and then teach lesson plans for Play the Knave, subsequently researching the game’s impact on learning. Our chapter discusses the challenges of collaborating in a university environment, comparing these to the challenges players experience when interacting with avatars in Play the Knave. Like Knave’s players, participants in our programme faced difficulties connecting with other participants, including ourselves and local teachers. We maintain that flawed connection – which players of digital games describe as ‘glitchiness’ – need not undermine effective collaboration but can actually enhance it, as participants are pushed to adapt constantly to shifting circumstances. In contrast to theories of artistic collaboration that prioritize participants achieving a state of ‘flow’, we argue that, in fact, collaborations can be most successful when marked by fits and starts, lags and the imperfect connections endemic to living in a digital world.

In the final scene of Shakespeare's Love's Labor's Lost, two simultaneous but unequal games are played, one by the Navarrese lords and one by the ladies of France they are wooing. The King of Navarre and his three lords, who have sworn to seclude themselves from society, disguise themselves as Muscovites, aiming to visit the ladies unrecognized so as not to be scorned for breaking their oath. The ladies of France, tipped off, put on masks and trade love tokens so that each of the men unwittingly swears devotion to the wrong woman. The lords are players in the masquing tradition in which men wearing fantastical costumes would court their beloveds in disguise. The ladies, too, become players when they “change […] favors,” a phrase referring simultaneously to exchanging physical badges or markers and to altering their faces by wearing vizards. The men's game of deception is outdone by the women, whose counter-game of misdirection one-ups theirs. At the end of the interlude, after all is revealed, the lords, suitably humiliated, bring on the clownish pageant of the Nine Worthies, for “’tis some policy/ To have one show worse than the King's and his company” (5.2.512–513).

This episode captures some of the myriad fascinations and challenges that lie at the intersection of games and theatre. In Shakespeare's stageplay, the masque of Russians and the ladies’ counteraction are imagined as a kind of competitive recreation.

As elementary and secondary school educators increasingly adopt digital games to teach content in a range of subjects, and as education and game scholars turn their attention to ‘serious games’, it is worth noting that serious games are nothing new to Shakespeare classrooms. Non-digital games and playful performance practices have long been a standard part of teaching the dramas of Shakespeare. Indeed, the use of physical, play-based methods of teaching Shakespeare – or what we shall call ‘playful pedagogy’ – has become something of an industry in the world of Shakespeare education. Theatrical games and dramatic playfulness are central to the teacher-training programmes touted by Education departments in many well-established Shakespeare theatres. The Royal Shakespeare Company calls their programme ‘rehearsal room pedagogy’, Shakespeare’s Globe has its ‘Globe Strategies’, Chicago Shakespeare has its ‘drama-based strategies’, and there are similar initiatives at other theatres, including the American Shakespeare Center in Virginia and the Folger Shakespeare Library. Education departments of these and other Shakespeare theatres offer specialized workshops that train teachers to use playful pedagogy in their classrooms.