Prepared for delivery at the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE), Spring 2026
For centuries, the cultural and economic prominence and unique interactive affordances of games have encouraged educators to imagine “gameful” teaching in which students engage learning material more actively (Bloom, Gaming the Stage 66–68, Sheldon 27–46). Shakespeare education has not remained untouched by this trend. In an era in which games increasingly mediate students’ encounters with reality (Walz et al. 19–22; Wark 22), instructors are increasingly turning to games as tools for fostering “active,” agential engagement with Shakespeare’s plays (Kaethler 44). Given the increasing appearance of games in Shakespeare classrooms, it seems timely to ask: Where does this interest in using play in education generally come from? And what can games do for Shakespeare education that it cannot do for itself? To answer this second question, we must also address what constitutes effective Shakespeare education in the twenty-first century and why games are particularly suited to facilitate it.
In 2019, Laura Estill argued that “digital humanities has a Shakespeare problem,” contending that Shakespeare’s canonical centrality has disproportionately structured early modern digital and archival initiatives (1). Shakespeare’s canonical dominance has proven similarly problematic within educational contexts, to the extent that Shakespeare pedagogy itself may be said to have a Shakespeare problem, one that increasingly constrains teachers’ and students’ ability to approach his plays freely and creatively. Inside the classroom, this problem stems not only from the historical, cultural, and political forces that have secured Shakespeare’s place in the English literary canon, but also from the fact that Shakespeare education does not exist in a vacuum. It functions within institutional systems and faces the same pressures and constraints that shape higher education today.
Media scholar Ian Bogost argues that contemporary academic institutions, pressured by the assumption that their primary duty is to prepare students for the job market, function less as sites of intellectual emancipation than as mechanisms for producing compliant workers. Work, he observes, has become the telos of education, the intended outcome for those who have been “properly schooled.” (Bogost 275).
The normalization of such a view of higher education has dire repercussions. In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks argues that modern education is facing a crisis: “students often do not want to learn, and teachers do not want to teach” (12). According to hooks, one reason behind this issue is that today’s institutions view “excitement” in teaching as potentially disruptive of the atmosphere of “seriousness assumed to be essential to the learning process.” Such contempt for excitement is systemic and, in fact, necessary to secure the institution’s role as a factory for producing disciplined workers within the capitalist economy. Hooks contends that genuine excitement cannot arise without acknowledging that “there could never be an absolute set agenda governing teaching practices” (7).
But why is excitement so integral to emancipatory learning? According to the French philosopher of education Jacques Rancière, modern institutions operate on a “pedagogical myth” that divides human intelligence into two types, positing a superior intelligence on the part of the “schoolmaster” and an inferior one on the part of the student (7). This presupposed inferiority often renders the student’s independent engagement with primary texts meaningless. By virtue of their presumed superiority, the “schoolmaster” becomes an indispensable component of what Rancière terms the “explicative order,” in which “the words of the master must shatter the silence of the taught material.” Rancière uses the term “enforced stultification” to describe this structure: a system in which the master assumes intellectual superiority and sustains an “imagined” distance between their intelligence and that of the pupil. Therefore, the student comes to the classroom already stultified, thinking of the teacher as the guardian of certain truths lying behind old texts. In other words, the real problem is how we view knowledge rather than how we disseminate it.
Read together, these arguments bring the structural problem of contemporary educational institutions into sharper focus. Schools are increasingly compelled to promise preparation for the labor market. To deliver such preparation “efficiently” and at scale, institutions adopt fixed agendas that often come at the expense of collective knowledge production and student excitement. This erosion of excitement perpetuates a regime of enforced stultification that secures the teacher’s position as a master explicator. In today’s Shakespeare classroom, this process is reflected through what Liam Semler terms the “SysEd,” the “over-systematisation of formal education” that characterizes professional teaching and learning in the twenty-first century (“Prosperous Teaching” 1), which has brought about the proliferation of tools such as No Fear Shakespeare and the gradual disappearance of educational methods focusing on slow and close reading. It is in the face of such problems that welcoming games and play in the classroom proves important.
Play, as a voluntary, disinterested, and unproductive activity (and I should quickly acknowledge that this is a very Western conception of play rooted deep in the works of Kant and Schiller), has been historically conceived as a safeguard, protecting the human mind and culture against the mechanization of social and educational practices. With the establishment of Game Studies as an academic discipline and the rise of concepts such as “gamification” and “serious games” in the past decades, teachers have increasingly turned to games and play to counter the “over-systematization of formal education” (Semler, “Prosperous Teaching” 1).
A survey of Shakespeare education’s engagement with games and play in contemporary English classrooms reveals two dominant approaches: gamified Shakespeare curricula and Shakespeare-game-infused classrooms. The first trend seeks to gamify Shakespeare by integrating discrete game mechanics—points, competition, and rule-based structures—into otherwise conventional curricular frameworks. The second approach turns not to gamification but to Shakespeare-themed video games, tabletop games, and card games, which are typically employed either to facilitate close textual analysis or to cultivate theatrical skills, including directing, acting, and spectating (Roberts-Smith et al., “Shakespeare, Game, and Play” 276).
In 2016, Liam Semler coined the term “SysEd” to describe “the state, processes and truths of modern, professionalised education which positions educators and students in an interlocking network of systems that deliver standardisation, measurement and compliance.” According to Semler, the “SysEd” names “the educational sector’s actualisation of larger neoliberal impulses that promote economies of competitive productivity and responsibilisation” (“Prosperous Teaching” 3). The operation of the SysEd inevitably creates what Semler terms “ardenspace,” a concept he introduced in 2013 through a pedagogical reading of court and exile in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. For Semler, “ardenspace” designates temporary spaces of experimental teaching and learning established outside the constraints of the SysEd (i.e. the court), spaces intended to afford educators and students more fertile educational experiences (Teaching Shakespeare and Marlowe 54–55). In other words, “ardenspaces” function as pedagogical sanctuaries beyond the rigid, exam-driven structures of the institution, inviting students to exercise creativity and critical thought in less constrained, more exploratory ways.
According to Semler, gamifying the Shakespeare classroom can effectively accelerate the production of the “ardenspace” by diminishing the aura of seriousness that surrounds both Shakespeare as a cultural icon and modern academia as a system oriented toward the reproduction of predictable outcomes in service of the neoliberal economy. To substantiate this claim, Semler points to “Shakeserendipity,” a project developed by the Better Strangers team in 2015. The project engages players with Shakespeare-related resources through the use of playing cards, creating ardenspaces by privileging serendipitous discovery over “intended learning outcomes” (Semler, “Prosperous Teaching” 4).
Despite the passionate promises of gamified practices, we must reckon with the limitations of gamification: a term rooted in behavioral economics and originally developed to deploy game elements in the service of productivity and profit maximization. Modern game scholars argue that the proponents of gamification predominantly subscribe to “the liminal use of games and play as a conservative perfection of means toward the given goals of the existing social order” (Walz et al. 9). As such, they argue that gamification often reproduces hierarchy under the guise of experiences that are framed as fun, interactive, and productive of extrinsic rewards (Jagoda 143). Rooted in economic rationality, gamification thus risks reinstating the very consumerist neoliberal logics that Semler’s “ardenspace” aims to resist. Furthermore, gamification is frequently deployed in educational contexts to “make typically boring tasks fun by transforming labor into an action-oriented and interactive game” (Jagoda 120). Viewed in this way, gamifying the Shakespeare classroom risks implying that Shakespeare and (its) learning are in essence “boring” or “burdensome,” necessitating the use of gamification techniques to entice students into engaging with the plays.
But gamification is not the only way play has found its way into the Shakespeare classroom. The field of Shakespeare video games has witnessed an explosion in the past two decades (Bloom “Video Game Shakespeare” 114; Way 256). Shakespeare games are gradually finding their way into the Shakespeare classroom. In “Video Game Shakespeare,” Gina Bloom sorts these games broadly under the two categories of “drama-making games,” which enable their players to control a Shakespearean character to change the outcome in a dramatic plot, and “theater-making games,” which turn the students into directors or actors of Shakespearean plays to give them a sense of “what it is like to put on a play, in all its diverse facets” (115).
Arguing that drama-making games often fail to enskill their players in the “experience of theater” (Bloom,“Video Game Shakespeare” 115), Bloom’s vision of a successful pedagogical Shakespeare video game is that of a motion-capture “theater-making” game, Play the Knave (ModLab, 2020), which uses Microsoft Kinect to map players’ movements onto avatars while displaying Shakespeare’s lines in karaoke format (Bloom et al., “Video Game Shakespeare” 119–23). In their emphasis on embodied textual analysis, performance-based games such as Play the Knave resemble performance-centric pedagogical theories that became popular in the mid-twentieth century with the works of scholars such as Rex Gibson, the writer of The Cambridge School Shakespeare series, who insisted activities in the Shakespeare classroom must embrace the “experimental ethos of the theatrical rehearsal room” (qtd. in Stevens 43). As children of such performance-based teaching theories, performative video games such as Play the Knave can be emancipatory insofar as they increase student agency in exploring Shakespeare’s plays through embodied practices and reduce the role of the teacher in the Shakespeare classroom to a “catalyst” who guides student learning without directly interpreting or “explicating” the plays for the students.
Regardless of the prevalent optimism toward the effectiveness of embodied teaching, performative games such as Play the Knave have yet to be critically studied for their limitations. For example, while Bloom and Bates claim that Play the Knave can effectively build a safe space in the classroom where students can engage with painful topics in Shakespeare’s plays from a distance, the game’s focus on performativity might just as easily prove problematic, as students might not always feel safe performing before an audience. In Teaching Shakespeare and His Sisters, Emma Whipday notices that “the most significant barrier to incorporating embodied activities in the classroom can be student discomfort, particularly among students who, in choosing a literature module, did not expect to learn through their bodies” (8). Scholars such as Carol Atherton and Katherine Hennessey have similarly noted the stress associated with in-class Shakespeare performance and criticism, particularly for non-English-speaking students (109–19; 172–80).
Future studies on performance-based video games must also acknowledge the facts that the required equipment for running games such as Play the Knave is costly, environmentally unsustainable, and increasingly obsolete with the decline of motion-capture technology. Engagement with such games also often remains confined to the classroom, and the format usually excludes students with disabilities or mobility limitations. Finally, the proponents of performance-based games are yet to make a strong case for what their games bring to the table that traditional performance-based teaching methods don’t.
While contemporary Shakespeare scholars are writing passionately about the possible ways in which games and gamefulness can offer new ways of approaching Shakespeare in the classroom, little attention has been paid to how the unique affordances of video games as the most prominent media format in the twenty-first century can enable a learning model that reduces student dependency on the educator and empowers them to explore Shakespeare’s plays on their own terms. I believe that the problem stems from the fact that discussions of game design and gameful curriculum design can never precede the question of why we need games and gamification practices to teach Shakespeare in the first place.
In Good Video Games + Good Learning: Collected Essays on Video Games, Learning and Literacy, linguist James Paul Gee argues that the study of “good video games,” which he defines as games that embody strong principles of learning and cognition, can effectively “illuminate ways in which learning works when it works best for human beings.” For Gee, good game designers are “practical theoreticians of learning,” since what makes games “deep” is that players exercise their “learning muscles,” often without paying overt attention to the matter (Good Video Games 21).
First, Gee argues that “the purpose of games as learning … should be to make every learner a proactive, collaborative, reflective, critical, creative, and innovative problem solver.” In solving problems, Gee believes that video game players constantly build patterns of associations between what they know and what they aim to learn. This process is also key to Jacques Rancière’s theory of universal teaching (Rancière 20). In Shakespeare Studies, Edward Rocklin echoes this logic, arguing that we must teach the students “to read as talented interpreters of Shakespeare do,” guiding them to ask: “what does X do? (and to what purpose), where X is ‘any element of a Shakespearean play from the title to the actions’” (52).
Gee also argues that “all learning in all semiotic domains requires identity work” (What Video Games Have to Teach Us 77–78). This “identity work,” entails “taking on a new identity and forming bridges from one’s old identities to the new one.” For example, “a child in a science classroom engaged in real inquiry, and not passive learning, must be willing to take on an identity as a certain type of scientific thinker, problem solver, and doer.” The child must also see and make connections between this new identity and other identities that they have already formed (What Video Games Have 51). Similarly, a student in a Shakespeare classroom must be willing to take on new identities as a theater director, a choreographer, an actor, and even a literary critic, all the while making connections between these new identities and the identities the student has already formed and brings with them to the classroom. Video games are ideal venues for such identity work, as the player is constantly encouraged to navigate between their own identity, the identity of the video game character, and the “projective identity” produced by the synthesis between the first two (What Video Games Have to Teach Us 55).4
Finally, Gee argues that a good video game operates within the learner’s “regime of competence,” something that rarely happens in today’s institutions. In other words, a good video game “often operates within, but at the outer edge of, the learner’s resources, so that at many points the game is felt as challenging but not ‘undoable’” (Good Video Games 70). In Shakespeare education, Malcolm Hebron emphasizes supporting students in operating at “the edge of their regime of competence.” Drawing on poet and critic Don Paterson, Hebron distinguishes between two types of reading. In “primary reading,” students read a poem, feel something, but do not “comb through” it from the beginning to the end. Unlike primary reading, secondary reading is “the construction of a second text based on the first,” which Hebron views as “an exercise of critical analysis.” For Hebron, the reason why Shakespeare’s works are difficult for young readers is that “they are forced to start at the second level” (101–2). Slow games, games that cannot be played at the high speed normally expected by players (Ensslin 184), are particularly useful in helping their players operate at the edge of their regime of competence.
Overall, games are great tools to enable emancipatory Shakespeare education by eliminating the distance between the student and the primary text they are aiming to explore. They turn learners into active problem solvers; they allow students to explore different identities and make connections between them; and they facilitate expanding students’ regime of competence. Nevertheless, all of these affordances are overlooked by gamification models and performance-centric game designs. Rather than forcing video games to conform to consumerist or old pedagogical and aesthetic models, educators and designers must trust the capacities of the medium itself and continue developing games that work through, rather than against, its formal strengths. Such an approach is especially important today, as video games constitute a medium with which contemporary and future students possess an increasing degree of familiarity, fluency, and cultural investment.
Works Cited
Atherton, Carol. “Teaching Shakespeare and Social Media: How Many Facebook Friends Had Lady Macbeth?” Shakespeare, Education and Pedagogy, edited by Pamela Bickley and Jenny Stevens, 1st ed., vol. 1, Routledge, 2023, pp. 109–19, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003188704-16.
Bloom, Gina. Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theater. University of Michigan Press, 2018.
Bloom, Gina. “Videogame Shakespeare: Enskilling Audiences through Theater-Making Games.” Shakespeare Studies, vol. 43, 2015, pp. 114–19.
Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. 1st ed. MIT Press, 2007.
Ensslin, Astrid. Literary Gaming. 1st ed. The MIT Press, 2014, https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9450.001.0001.
Estill, Laura. “Digital Humanities’ Shakespeare Problem.” Humanities, vol. 8, no. 1, Mar. 2019, p. 45, https://doi.org/10.3390/h8010045
Gee, James Paul. Good Video Games + Good Learning: Collected Essays on Video Games, Learning and Literacy. 2nd ed. Peter Lang, 2013.
Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. 1st ed., Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Hennessey, Katherine. “Shakespeare, University Education, and Anti-Racism in Kuwait: A Drop of Water in the Breaking Gulf.” Shakespeare, Education and Pedagogy, edited by Pamela Bickley and Jenny Stevens, 1st ed., vol. 1, Routledge, 2023, pp. 172–80, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003188704-23.
hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge, 1994.
Jagoda, Patrick. “Gamification and Other Forms of Play.” Boundary, vol. 40, no. 2, 2013, pp. 113–44, https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-2151821.
Kaethler, Mark. “All the Game Is a Stage: The Controller and Interface in Shakespearean Videogames.” The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Interface, edited by Paul Budra and Clifford Werier, 1st ed. Routledge, 2023, pp. 44–57, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367821722-5.
Rancière, Jacques. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Stanford University Press, 1991.
Roberts-Smith, Jennifer, and Shawn DeSouza-Coelho “Shakespeare, Game, and Play in Digital Pedagogical Shakespeare Games.” Games and Theatre in Shakespeare’s England, edited by Gina Bloom et al., Routledge, 2021, pp. 275–302, https://doi.org/10.1515/9789048553525-014.
Rocklin, Edward L. “Performance Is More Than an Approach to Shakespeare.” Teaching Shakespeare through Performance, edited by Milla Cozart Riggio, Modern Language Association of America, 1999. pp. 48–62.
Semler, Liam E. Teaching Shakespeare and Marlowe: Learning versus the System. 1st ed., Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013, https://doi.org/10.5040/9781472538956.
—. “Prosperous Teaching and the Thing of Darkness: Raising a Tempest in the Classroom.” Cogent Arts & Humanities, vol. 3, no. 1, 2016, p. 1235862, https://doi.org/10.1080/23311983.2016.1235862.
Sheldon, Lee. The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game. 2nd ed. CRC Press, 2020.
Stevens, Jenny. “Lifting Shakespeare Off the Page in Twentieth-Century Classrooms.” Shakespeare, Education and Pedagogy, edited by Pamela Bickley and Jenny Stevens, 1st ed., vol. 1, Routledge, 2023, pp. 41–49, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003188704-7.
Walz, Steffen P., and Sebastian Deterding. The Gameful World: Approaches, Issues, Applications. The MIT Press, 2014.
Wark, McKenzie. Gamer Theory. Harvard University Press, 2007.
Whipday, Emma. Teaching Shakespeare and His Sisters. 1st ed. Cambridge University Press, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108975650.
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