An old man once said, “All the world’s a stage” (Shakespeare, II, VII, 146-147). To me, these words have always seemed like a glimpse into my own life, as if viewed through a crystal ball. As a mathematics student with a stern mind who decided to pursue English, I found myself entering the world of literature midway through the story, like an actor stepping onto the stage in the middle of a play. Embarking on an experience for which I never felt fully prepared, I explored the worlds created by players who had been performing on this ancient stage for centuries before me. Just when I thought I had learned the workings of the stage, I had to uproot myself to perform in a new scene. Today, after traveling thousands of miles for what I once decided I liked to do, I can safely say that the world is not just a stage. It is also a game. It calls for us to play it, and it gets tough on us when we do not. This realization inspired my Master’s public humanities project as an English student at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario.
The idea for Othello, a Game, a board game designed to make reading Shakespeare’s Othello more enjoyable and accessible, first came to me after encountering Gina Bloom’s [1]research on video gaming Shakespearean plays. For a long time, Bloom and her colleagues at the University of California Davis’ ModLab have been developing Play the Knave, a mimetic interface game utilizing Microsoft Kinect technology to project players’ movements onto digital avatars (Bloom & Buswell, What’s Past is Prologue). Since its introduction, Play the Knave has opened promising prospects in teaching Shakespearean drama in innovative ways. Proved by its success at the Stratford Festival in Ontario in 2015, the game effectively mirrors the commercial early-modern plays’ ability to engage audiences, with spectators watching players perform the game’s drama (Bloom, Gaming the Stage, 231). Moreover, as Bloom asserts in a 2005 essay, immersive gaming technologies could revolutionize “theatre-making” games by making the players’ bodies a pivotal part of the experience. According to Bloom, previous theatre-making games often focused either on placing students in the role of a Shakespearean character (“drama-making games”) or familiarizing them with the process of preparing a theatrical performance in Shakespeare’s time (“scholar-making games”). Bloom critiques the “incompatibility between the bodily mechanics of theatre-making games”, arguing that they fail to “enskill successfully their users in the experience of theatre,” (Bloom, “Videogame Shakespeare”, 155).
However, despite all my admiration for it, Play the Knave is without its flaws. As a graduate student of English, I had the chance to study and teach Shakespeare simultaneously, placing me within what Bloom—borrowing from Marcelo Lopez de Souza—refers to as a “horizontal dialogue” between Shakespeare teachers and scholars (Bloom & Bates, 9). However, I am not merely a researcher and a teacher but also a student. Constantly turning the legs of this triangle throughout my Master’s program, I finally found a more realistic view of the shortcomings of Play the Knave and similar digital humanities projects designed to facilitate teaching Shakespeare through games, especially in the context of a university classroom. Using immersive gaming technology, Play the Knave successfully addresses the gap in traditional “theatre-making” games by immersing players in the experience of a theatrical performance. However, this focus on the theatrical experience often comes at the expense of close reading and textual analysis. This trade-off is particularly evident in academic settings, where close engagement with the text is crucial. Digital humanities projects like Play the Knave also face accessibility challenges. Not all students can participate in games requiring Microsoft Kinect cameras or PlayStation VR, and technical setup can be a barrier for many educators. Despite these limitations, Bloom has never claimed that she had designed Play the Knave specifically for academic use.
Inspired by the strengths and limitations of Play the Knave, I sought to create a more accessible and text-focused tool for teaching Shakespeare. My goal was to design a pedagogical game that retained the immersive, interactive elements of Play the Knave while emphasizing close reading and critical analysis. This goal led to the development of Othello, a Game, a board game aimed at making Shakespeare’s Othello more engaging and accessible for students.
Augmented reality video games such as Play the Knave are innovative as they allow students to use their bodies to walk in the shoes of Shakespearean characters while keeping a safe distance from the world of the plays. They also take advantage of the power of vicarious play, through which every student becomes a playgoer who can critically engage with the events on the stage. I liked to have this valuable feature in my version of a Shakespeare-themed game. However, I also believed that if a game was supposed to help English teachers (especially at the university level), it could not afford to lose much of its scholarly attention only to get close to the theatre experience. Thus, I needed to find a new way of looking at Bloom’s problem: How to teach textually crucial materials while making the players’ bodies an integral part of the game. As Bloom rightly suggests, the key lay in a horizontal dialogue, yet a dialogue not between the teacher and the scholar but between the teacher and the editor. Being a part of an editorial team at the Linking Early Modern Drama Online project (LEMDO[2]) helped me make such a dialogue happen. While a teacher needs their students to learn the plays by performing them, an editor needs their readers to get familiar with the most nuanced details of the text and its historical background. In my experience, an English student dealing with Shakespearean plays should have access to both if they are supposed to think critically about the plays and the world around them. Therefore, Othello, a Game’s task became to draw a new triangle with three new angles: the student, the teacher, and the editor. Now that I had a less opaque definition of the “public” whom I wanted to address, I needed to decide what means to use to connect with them, and so began the fun.
Bloom had taught me earlier about the role of board games in early modern stages. They were tools that connected the theatre with the tavern and gave the audience something through which they could relate to the plays (Bloom, Gaming the Stage, 22-32). However, a board game could do more than that. It also offered affordability. After the project was complete, I uploaded all the necessary templates of the game on a weblog so every teacher could print the game materials free of charge and use them in their classrooms. In addition, not only does the physicality of board games make them proper tools for community building and a perfect means for a public humanities project, but their adaptability and potential for digitization guarantee accessibility to a larger audience. Like a theatrical performance, you can develop a board game in a design that other teachers can adapt for their classrooms. While Othello, a Game focuses on teaching Othello to English students (or any other person interested in reading the play), the structure of the game and the design of the game board is such that it can be customized to teach almost any other Shakespearean play. Inspired by the design of an old board game called The Game of the Goose, the five-staged, spiral game board of Othello, a Game mirrors the five acts of a typical Shakespearean play. Finally, as a “system of information” (Bloom, Gaming the Stage, 100), the game employs a teaching method which combines oral narration, performance, and creative sketching practices while challenging players with questions posed from an editorial perspective[3]. The game tasks make students use dictionaries, glossaries of literary terms, and the critical paratexts provided by editors on the opening pages of every edition of an early modern play, thus familiarizing them with what an English student needs to know about every play. In other words, the game is an unconventional edition of Shakespeare’s Othello, which helps its users, read the play without the help of a teacher. Finally, much effort has gone into designing the game tasks to motivate players to learn from each other, thus helping them refine their teaching skills.
Whether the world is a stage or a game, perhaps the wisest thing for us to do is to play along. However, this does not mean that what we do lacks importance; quite the contrary. We leave our marks on the stage, and those marks can become thresholds for others to enter. Othello, a Game aims to provide a more enjoyable experience for anyone interested in reading a Shakespearean play. If successful, it will open a door for its users to make their marks on the stage, too. For me, making a board game was a move on the game board—a move that took me far out of my comfort zone as an isolated scholar, made me dirty my hands with glue and paint, and gave me an experience that I will carry with me to the next scene of the play that is my life.
Works Cited
Bloom, Gina, and Lauren Bates. “Play to learn: Shakespeare games as decolonial praxis in south african schools.” Shakespeare in Southern Africa, vol. 34, no. 1, 3 Jan. 2022, pp. 7–22, https://doi.org/10.4314/sisa.v34i1.2.
Bloom, Gina. Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theater. University of Michigan Press, 2018.
–. “Videogame Shakespeare: enskilling audiences through theater-making games.” Shakespeare Studies 43, 2015, pp. 114-9.
Bloom, Gina, Buswell, Evan. What’s Past Is Prologue – Experimenting with Shakespeare: Games and Play in the Laboratory, shakesperiment.tome.press/chapter/whats-past-is-prologue/. Accessed 31 May 2024.
Shakespeare, William, et al. As You Like It. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2019, New York.
[1] Gina Bloom joined the UC Davis English faculty in 2007 and has since become affiliated faculty with the PhD programs in Education and Performance Studies. Her areas of interest include early modern English drama (especially Shakespeare), gender and feminist theory, theater history and performance studies, game studies, digital arts/humanities, and education. Visit this page for more information and publications.
[2] LEMDO (Linked Early Modern Drama Online) is a SSHRC-funded platform for editing and encoding early modern plays in TEI, building anthologies, and publishing the LEMDO Hornbooks series. Visit this page for more information.
[3] See this video for more information about the structure of the game.
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