The Game's Afoot

Gina Bloom has recently observed that since 2008, “the field of Shakespeare gaming has exploded.” Shakespeare games are emerging as legitimate objects of study in our field at a time when the broader field of game studies has firmly established game design as a legitimate form of pedagogy. Although popular Shakespeare games—even those with pedagogical goals—still largely aim merely to capitalize on the cultural currency of the Bard, Shakespeare scholars are increasingly thinking of games—in particular digital games—as opportunities to engage pedagogically with students and theatre audiences about Shakespeare's works for the theatre. To date, we are aware of two broad trends in digital pedagogical Shakespeare games designed by Shakespeare scholars, each taking a distinct approach to scaffolding deep engagements with Shakespeare's play-texts. The first—which we think of as gamified textual analyses—aims to develop students’ analytical skills by setting completion conditions that can only be achieved through detailed engagement with the language, plot, characters, and/or themes of Shakespeare's plays; E. B. Hunter's Something Wicked and Katherine Acheson et al.'s Who Killed Romeo and Juliet? take this approach. The second category—staging games, pioneered in digital form by Larry Friedlander in 1991 with TheatreGame—positions players as theatre-makers in variations on sandbox games that simulate the decision-making processes involved in staging a play; Staging Shakespeare, Places, Please!: Hamlet Edition, and Play the Knave are all examples.