Shakespeare Magazine 08

Shakespeare video games
Gina Bloom at the University of California
at Davis is presently spearheading a project
that will be demonstrated in the lobby of the
Stratford Festival theatre in Ontario, Canada
this summer. The project, Play the Knave: A
Shakespeare Performance Videogame, lets users
design a virtual performance space and then
perform a scene from a Shakespeare play,
inhabiting this constructed space with an
avatar. As a Davis insider explains: “We use a
kinect motion capture camera to capture the
user’s skeletal data so that players use their
entire bodies to control their avatar’s gestures
onscreen, all the while reciting the lines from
Shakespeare’s scene”. This literally immerses
the players in the scene.
Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London
took another tactic regarding immersion
in the production of the game Hemmings’
Play Company . Hosted on the Playground
portion of the Globe’s website, and thus
aimed at an audience of children, the game
has players taking on the role of Hemmings,
an Elizabethan bear, who leads a troupe of
theatrical animals such as Kit the Cat, Dekker
the Dog, and Slye the Fox.
The turn-based game leads players through
the vagaries of Elizabethan theatre practice,
from patronage to lost props and the plague.
By the end of the game, players must earn
enough money to rebuild the Globe after it
burns down during a performance of Henry
VIII .
Also from Shakespeare’s Globe are two
innovative video experiences created for
children aged five to 11. The first, Exploring
Silent Hill 3: Brush up
your Shakespeare if
you want to survive.
Hemmings’ Play
Company from
Shakespeare’s
Globe.
Shakespeare , features two boys on a tour of
the Globe theatre who sneak off to explore
backstage. The video illustrates four plays
using short animations that are keyed
to things the boys find backstage. The
technology combines live action film and
animation to create an interactive, touchable
game. Filled with mini -games, quizzes and
interesting facts about Shakespeare, the game
allows players to click through the narrative
or to stop and learn more as they go along.
The second video, called Staging It , uses
the same technology as the first film, but this
time is for the 11-16 age group. In this game,
The Globe has filmed two actors performing
famous duologues from A Midsummer
Night’s Dream and Macbeth on the Globe
stage. Rather than shoot it once, the actors
have performed their lines in different ways
(happy, flirtatious, defensive and so on),
creating several different clips per line.
Players can watch each of the clips and add
their choice to a dynamic storyboard to
build up their final scene. Impressively, the
platform allows for up to 1,000,000 different
combinations of clips.
Apps and Mini-Games
It’s when you start to look outside of the
realm of popular video game platforms
like Xbox or Playstation, that Shakespeare
SHAKESPEARE magazine! 49