“The Play Is the Thing”: Repetition, Memory, and Tragic Time in Elsinore (Golden Glitch, 2019)

Prepared for delivery at the Canadian Game Studies Association conference (CGSA), Spring 2026

In his 2010 essay, titled “Shakespeare’s Theater Games,” theater scholar Tom Bishop argues that “the notion of the theater as a form of play or an event which includes various kinds of games or play-routines is very much a part of Shakespeare’s sense of what players do and what plays are made of” (Bishop 66). Given Shakespeare’s close association with play, it is not surprising that he has found his way into many video games in the past decades (Bloom 114; Way 256). In 2025, the Macbeth-inspired game Lili, produced by iNK Stories in collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company, became the first video game ever to be featured in the Immersive Competition at the Cannes Film Festival (Packwood, “‘Shakespeare Would Be Writing for Games Today’”).

Yet despite Shakespeare’s deep entanglement with games and play, the number of successful video game adaptations of his works remains small. I believe this is partly due to Shakespeare’s position as an icon within the Western literary canon. Shakespeare games are often expected to produce a recognizably Shakespearean experience, an expectation that frequently conflicts with video games’ emphasis on player agency and multiple narrative possibilities (Way 268-271). At the same time, Shakespeare games inherit expectations associated with theatrical performance itself, including the assumption that they should recreate the experiential richness of live theater. Consequently, some scholars have criticized Shakespeare-based games for their inability to reproduce the ontological complexity of theatrical experience (Bloom 115; Roberts-Smith et al. 16). And that’s what I’ll focus on today.

I will first draw on Jennifer Roberts-Smith and her collaborators’ 2023 essay, “Staging Shakespeare in Social Games,” to define “ontogenetic meaning-making” and “ontological multiplication,” the two processes through which they believe meaning is made in theater, and that distinguish theatrical and video game meaning-making. Turning next to Rebecca Bushnell’s Tragic Time in Drama, Film, and Videogames, I will demonstrate how these processes work together to produce tragic temporality and, consequently, tragic experience in plays such as Hamlet. Finally, I will examine Elsinore, Golden Glitch Studios’s 2019 point-and-click adaptation of Hamlet, to show how Shakespeare video games can translate the theater’s dynamics of meaning-making through ludic repetition, memory, and player agency rather than through imitation of theatrical form alone.

Roberts-Smith and her co-authors use three interrelated terms to set the foundation for their argument: “real,” “virtual,” and “imaginary.” “Real,” for them, is “a means of packaging the dimensional, temporal, material experiences of our everyday lives,” experienced through our physical senses, as well as “the immaterial, conceptual, perceptual, or affective experiences of our intellectual and emotional senses.” Further, they consider the “virtual” as an extension of the “real,” defining it as “a representation of one or the other kind of reality or both,” manifested usually “in or on some kind of non-human object […] like a book or a computer” but also sometimes “in or on a human object […] like a theatrical performance.” “The virtual,” in other words, “is a representation of human experience expressed through some material medium (e.g., paint, canvas, paper, skin, etc.).” So far as they both represent human experience in one way or another, video games and theater are both “virtuals.” The main difference between these two media, as the authors argue, lies in the creation of a fourth kind of experience. They call this experience “imaginary.” The imaginary, for them, is “[the experience] intentionally generated by an audience in response to the virtual” (Roberts-Smith et al. 5). What makes theater unique for them is that theater’s “imaginary,” the experience created through the audience’s response to the representation of reality, is different from the one created through the video game’s virtuality, since theatrical meaning-making is (1) “technological,” as opposed to “inscribed,” and (2) “ontogenetical,” as opposed to “individual.” But what do these terms really mean?

To explain the processes of meaning-making in theater, theater scholar William Worthen distinguishes between “tools” and “technologies.” Unlike tools, which “are [always] used to accomplish a specific task,” technologies possess “a public, social character.” As Worthen notes, a tool like a screwdriver can gain multiple meanings when presented in the technology of theater. As he explains, “driving a screw, opening a paint can, ballasting a sculpture, stealing a car, killing someone: each use of the tool engages a different sociability, a different conduct of technology” (21). Extending Worthen’s observations about dramatic texts to virtually “any material element that is manipulated in a theatrical production […] including light, sound, and human bodies as well as inanimate objects,” Roberts-Smith and her colleagues argue that “in technological use, a theatrical entity’s ontologies multiply exponentially” (6). Since their virtualities are “inscribed” or “coded” rather than “functional,” in the sense just mentioned, the authors argue that video games are inherently incapable of such ontological multiplication (Roberts-Smith et al. 7).

To further distinguish theatrical phenomenology from video games, the authors draw on Brian Massumi’s concept of ontogenesis, which they describe as an “open-ended sociality” through which audiences’ experience emerges in process. As a “process,” theatrical performance constitutes a field of reciprocal becoming in which performers and spectators mutually affect one another and can perceive themselves as changed by the encounter. In other words, in theater, “everyone is an agent of ontogenetic interaction” (Roberts-Smith et al. 7–8). In video games, by contrast, the authors argue that the ontological change occurs unevenly, since the player can never truly alter the ontology of the computer or the game itself. As they put it, “the only real element […] with an ontology that can be shifted is the player” (12), whose agency unfolds within a fixed system of rules and affordances, which the game scholar Espen Aarseth terms “the prison-house of regulated play” (“I fought the law” 188).

We can make certain critiques of such phenomenological distinctions between theater and video games. For example, if “functionality” or “instrumentality,” rather than inscription, distinguishes theatrical representation or theatrical “virtuality,” then the relevant question regarding “ontological multiplication” is not whether a game object is pre-coded, but whether it can be used in ways that exceed singular, determinate functions within a shared system of actions. There are many video games in which players use tools for unforeseen purposes. Moreover, their argument regarding “ontogenetic meaning-making” in video games holds only if we maintain strict distinctions among the ontologies of the player, the computer, and the video game. In reality, as posthumanist and new materialist scholars have shown, such human-centric separations often prove problematic.

The third, and perhaps most problematic limitation of this framework is that it confines “ontological multiplication” and “ontogenetic meaning-making” primarily to material theatrical elements, overlooking immaterial dimensions such as temporality, memory, and narratological possibility that are equally central to theatrical meaning-making. Elsinore, for example, reproduces tragic time not by imitating theatrical liveness, but by transforming repetition and memory into mechanisms of ontological multiplication and ontogenetic becoming, producing a form of tragic experience that is arguably Shakespearean.

In Elsinore, players control Ophelia, Polonius’s daughter and one of the most powerless figures in the whole corpus of Shakespeare’s works, including Hamlet. In Shakespeare’s play, she is caught between obedience to her father and her love for Hamlet, a conflict that leads to her death. The game reimagines her, however, as a figure capable of intervening in tragedy itself. It begins with Ophelia witnessing the play’s catastrophic ending in a nightmare. When she wakes, she finds herself trapped in a four-day time loop in which she is repeatedly murdered by an unknown assassin and returned to the same starting point. Unlike Shakespeare’s Ophelia, this version of her becomes an active investigator of causality, attempting to prevent the deaths unfolding around her. In this, she increasingly resembles Hamlet himself: they both inhabit a world where “the time is out of joint” and both attempt “to set it right” (1.5.210–11).

Yet Elsinore does not simply repeat the same sequence endlessly. Characters retain memories across loops, new events emerge while others disappear, and the timeline shifts in response to the player’s actions. The result is a branching narrative structure with thirteen possible endings, each requiring Ophelia to sacrifice one value for another. In one ending, for instance, Ophelia sacrifices innocence for power by allying with the demon king Claudius to rule over Denmark.

As mentioned earlier, theater produces “ontological multiplication” because its entities exist simultaneously in multiple states. This multiplication is fundamentally temporal. A performance of Hamlet is always shaped by what has already occurred, what is about to occur, what audiences already know, and what remains unrealized. As a result, spectators experience layered temporalities at once: the present moment of performance, the anticipated future of catastrophe, and the accumulated memory of past scenes. This is what Rebecca Bushnell describes as “tragic time,” a structure in which the knowledge of future catastrophe retroactively reshapes the meaning of the present and the future (Bushnell, “Tragedy and Temporality” 783). Tragedy, in this sense, emerges from the coexistence of temporal layers within a single dramatic now, where each moment is continuously redefined by what it is moving toward. Bushnell further argues that tragic experience arises as characters sequentially foreclose these temporal possibilities, narrowing the field of potential action until closure becomes inevitable (Tragic Time 31). Tragic meaning, therefore, does not pre-exist the performance but emerges through the interaction between script, actors, and audience. It is ontogenetic in that it is produced in real time through an affective process of shifting between possibility, inevitability, and failed revision. In this sense, tragic experience is not simply represented in time but generated through the audience’s changing relationship to time itself.

Elsinore translates tragic time into gameplay through its looping structure and its mechanics of memory. Each new loop begins not from zero, but from the player’s accumulated knowledge of previous iterations. As a result, repetition never produces identical events; instead, it continually reconfigures the meaning of action. In this, the game resembles what game scholar Bo Ruberg describes as a “permalife” game (160), in which the variations made through repetition are not necessarily interrelated, which allows players to explore different affective experiences without necessarily being pressured to reach a “win state.” Within this structure, ontological multiplication operates temporally. Remembered tragedies, unrealized possibilities, anticipated futures, and present actions coexist within each loop, so that every moment is defined by multiple temporal states at once.

However, the player is not the only one with knowledge of the past. Elsinore intentionally avoids being a simple permalife game. Ophelia, the NPCs, and the player all retain memories of prior timelines, meaning that each return to the loop is already structurally altered by what has been learned and experienced. Repetition, therefore, becomes even more transformative. The player never encounters the same loop twice, just as no theatrical performance of Hamlet can be identical to another at any moment. As the game’s creators note, their goal was not to produce a simple sandbox system, where players can do anything they want, but a temporally responsive narrative structure, able to make arguments about tragic meaning through its procedures (Petit, “Shaking Up Shakespeare”). Each loop reshapes emotional interpretation, ethical stakes, and affective intensity for both player and characters. A conversation with Hamlet in loop 10, for instance, carries accumulated grief, prior failures, knowledge of future deaths, and awareness of unrealized alternatives in a way that is structurally unavailable in loop 1. Tragic meaning is therefore not encoded in advance in Golden Glitch’s script, but continuously produced through the player’s ontogenetically evolving relationship to time, memory, repetition, and failure.

Overall, Elsinore’s tragedy demonstrates how we can use the affordances of video games to produce a distinct form of tragic affect, one that can be understood on its own terms rather than as an imitation of theatrical tragedy. This “affect” is deeply Shakespearean: it is haunted, recursive, and structured by the sense that time is perpetually “out of joint.” During the past years, Shakespeare scholars have continuously suggested that Shakespeare games must adopt the practices of the stage. Elsinore proves the opposite. Rather than forcing video games to conform to theatrical aesthetic models, I think that the designers of future Shakespeare games would benefit more by trusting the capacities of the medium itself and continuing to develop games that work through, rather than against, its formal strengths, something that Elsinore does beautifully.

Works Cited

Aarseth, Espen J. “I fought the law: Transgressive play and the implied player.” From literature to cultural literacy. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. pp. 180-188.

Bishop, Tom. “Shakespeare’s Theater Games.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, vol. 40, no. 1, Jan. 2010, pp. 65–88, https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-2009-014

Bloom, Gina. “Videogame Shakespeare: Enskilling Audiences through Theater-Making Games.” Shakespeare Studies, vol. 43, 2015, pp. 114–19.

Bushnell, Rebecca. “Tragedy and Temporality.” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America , vol. 129, no. 4, 2014, pp. 783–89, https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2014.129.4.783.

Bushnell, Rebecca W. Tragic Time in Drama, Film, and Videogames: The Future in the Instant. Springer Nature, 2016.

Packwood, Lewis. “‘Shakespeare Would Be Writing for Games Today’: Cannes’ First Video Game Lili Is a Retelling of Macbeth.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 22 May 2025, www.theguardian.com/games/2025/may/22/shakespeare-cannes-first-video-game-lili-macbeth-rs. 

Petit, Carolyn. “Shaking up Shakespeare’s Balance of Power in the Upcoming Game Elsinore.” Feminist Frequency, 10 Aug. 2016, feministfrequency.com/2016/04/11/shaking-up-shakespeares-balance-of-power-in-the-upcoming-game-elsinore/. Accessed on Jan 26, 2026.

Roberts-Smith, Jennifer, et al. “Staging Shakespeare in Social Games: Towards a Theory of Theatrical Game Design Authors.” Borrowers and Lenders, vol. 10, no. 1, 2023, https://doi.org/10.18274/ZARB5225.

Ruberg, Bo. “Permalife: Video Games and the Queerness of Living.” Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, vol. 9, no. 2, 2017, pp. 159–173,  https://doi.org/10.1386/jgvw.9.2.159_1 .

Way, Geoffrey. “Shakespeare Videogames, Adaptation/Appropriation, and Collaborative Reception.” Games and Theatre in Shakespeare’s England, edited by Gina Bloom et al., 1st ed., Routledge, 2021, pp. 255–73, https://doi.org/10.5117/9789463723251_CH10.

Wilde, Poppy. Posthuman Gaming: Avatars, Gamers, and Entangled Subjectivities. 1st ed., Taylor & Francis Group, 2023, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003207191.

Worthen, William B. Drama: Between Poetry and Performance. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.