{"id":233,"date":"2026-06-09T16:32:15","date_gmt":"2026-06-09T16:32:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/othelloagame\/?p=233"},"modified":"2026-06-11T13:27:20","modified_gmt":"2026-06-11T13:27:20","slug":"the-play-is-the-thing-repetition-memory-and-tragic-time-in-elsinore-golden-glitch-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/othelloagame\/2026\/06\/09\/the-play-is-the-thing-repetition-memory-and-tragic-time-in-elsinore-golden-glitch-2019\/","title":{"rendered":"\u00a0\u201cThe Play Is the Thing\u201d: Repetition, Memory, and Tragic Time in Elsinore (Golden Glitch, 2019)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Prepared for delivery at the Canadian Game Studies Association conference (CGSA), Spring 2026<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his 2010 essay, titled \u201cShakespeare\u2019s Theater Games,\u201d theater scholar Tom Bishop argues that \u201cthe 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\u2019s sense of what players do and what plays are made of\u201d (Bishop 66). Given Shakespeare\u2019s 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<\/em>, 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, \u201c\u2018Shakespeare Would Be Writing for Games Today\u2019\u201d).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet despite Shakespeare\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019 emphasis on player agency and multiple narrative possibilities (Way 268-271). At the same time, Shakespeare games inherit expectations associated with theatrical performance<\/em> 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\u2019s what I\u2019ll focus on today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I will first draw on Jennifer Roberts-Smith and her collaborators\u2019 2023 essay, \u201cStaging Shakespeare in Social Games,\u201d to define \u201contogenetic meaning-making\u201d and \u201contological multiplication,\u201d 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\u2019s Tragic Time in Drama, Film, and Videogames<\/em>, I will demonstrate how these processes work together to produce tragic temporality and, consequently, tragic experience in plays such as Hamlet<\/em>. Finally, I will examine Elsinore<\/em>, Golden Glitch Studios\u2019s 2019 point-and-click adaptation of Hamlet<\/em>, to show how Shakespeare video games can translate the theater\u2019s dynamics of meaning-making through ludic repetition, memory, and player agency rather than through imitation of theatrical form alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Roberts-Smith and her co-authors use three interrelated terms to set the foundation for their argument: \u201creal,\u201d \u201cvirtual,\u201d and \u201cimaginary.\u201d \u201cReal,\u201d for them, is \u201ca means of packaging the dimensional, temporal, material experiences of our everyday lives,\u201d experienced through our physical senses, as well as \u201cthe immaterial, conceptual, perceptual, or affective experiences of our intellectual and emotional senses.\u201d Further, they consider the \u201cvirtual\u201d as an extension of the \u201creal,\u201d defining it as \u201ca representation of one or the other kind of reality or both,\u201d manifested usually \u201cin or on some kind of non-human object [\u2026] like a book or a computer\u201d but also sometimes \u201cin or on a human object [\u2026] like a theatrical performance.\u201d \u201cThe virtual,\u201d in other words, \u201cis a representation of human experience expressed through some material medium (e.g., paint, canvas, paper, skin, etc.).\u201d So far as they both represent<\/em> human experience in one way or another, video games and theater are both \u201cvirtuals.\u201d 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 \u201cimaginary.\u201d The imaginary, for them, is \u201c[the experience] intentionally generated by an audience in response to the virtual\u201d (Roberts-Smith et al. 5). What makes theater unique for them is that theater\u2019s \u201cimaginary,\u201d the experience<\/em> created through the audience\u2019s response<\/em> to the representation of reality<\/em>, is different from the one created through the video game\u2019s virtuality, since theatrical meaning-making is (1) \u201ctechnological,\u201d as opposed to \u201cinscribed,\u201d and (2) \u201contogenetical,\u201d as opposed to \u201cindividual.\u201d But what do these terms really mean?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To explain the processes of meaning-making in theater, theater scholar William Worthen distinguishes between \u201ctools\u201d and \u201ctechnologies.\u201d Unlike tools, which \u201care [always] used to accomplish a specific task,\u201d technologies possess \u201ca public, social character.\u201d As Worthen notes, a tool like a screwdriver can gain multiple meanings when presented in the technology of theater. As he explains, \u201cdriving 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\u201d (21). Extending Worthen\u2019s observations about dramatic texts to virtually \u201cany material element that is manipulated in a theatrical production [\u2026] including light, sound, and human bodies as well as inanimate objects,\u201d Roberts-Smith and her colleagues argue that \u201cin technological use, a theatrical entity\u2019s ontologies multiply exponentially\u201d (6). Since their virtualities are \u201cinscribed\u201d or \u201ccoded\u201d rather than \u201cfunctional,\u201d in the sense just mentioned, the authors argue that video games are inherently<\/em> incapable of such ontological multiplication (Roberts-Smith et al. 7).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To further distinguish theatrical phenomenology from video games, the authors draw on Brian Massumi\u2019s concept of ontogenesis<\/em>, which they describe as an \u201copen-ended sociality\u201d through which audiences\u2019 experience emerges in process. As a \u201cprocess,\u201d 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, \u201ceveryone is an agent of ontogenetic interaction\u201d (Roberts-Smith et al. 7\u20138). 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, \u201cthe only real element [\u2026] with an ontology that can be shifted is the player\u201d (12), whose agency unfolds within a fixed system of rules and affordances, which the game scholar Espen Aarseth terms \u201cthe prison-house of regulated play\u201d (\u201cI fought the law\u201d 188).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We can make certain critiques of such phenomenological distinctions between theater and video games. For example, if \u201cfunctionality\u201d or \u201cinstrumentality,\u201d rather than inscription, distinguishes theatrical representation or theatrical \u201cvirtuality,\u201d then the relevant question regarding \u201contological multiplication\u201d is not whether a game object is pre-coded, but whether it can be used<\/em> 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 \u201contogenetic meaning-making\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The third, and perhaps most problematic limitation of this framework is that it confines \u201contological multiplication\u201d and \u201contogenetic meaning-making\u201d primarily to material<\/em> theatrical elements, overlooking immaterial dimensions such as temporality, memory, and narratological possibility that are equally central to theatrical meaning-making. Elsinore<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Elsinore<\/em>, players control Ophelia, Polonius\u2019s daughter and one of the most<\/em> powerless figures in the whole corpus of Shakespeare\u2019s works, including Hamlet<\/em>. In Shakespeare\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201cthe time is out of joint\u201d and both attempt \u201cto set it right\u201d (1.5.210\u201311).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet Elsinore<\/em> 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As mentioned earlier, theater produces \u201contological multiplication\u201d because its entities exist simultaneously in multiple states. This multiplication is fundamentally temporal. A performance of Hamlet<\/em> is always shaped by what has already<\/em> occurred, what is about<\/em> to occur, what audiences already know<\/em>, and what remains unrealized<\/em>. 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 \u201ctragic time,\u201d a structure in which the knowledge of future catastrophe retroactively reshapes the meaning of the present and the future (Bushnell, \u201cTragedy and Temporality\u201d 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<\/em> 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\u2019s changing relationship to time itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elsinore<\/em> 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\u2019s 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 \u201cpermalife\u201d 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 \u201cwin state.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, the player is not the only one with knowledge of the past. Elsinore<\/em> 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<\/em> can be identical to another at any moment. As the game\u2019s 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, \u201cShaking Up Shakespeare\u201d). 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\u2019s script, but continuously produced through the player\u2019s ontogenetically evolving relationship to time, memory, repetition, and failure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Overall, Elsinore<\/em>\u2019s 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<\/em> tragedy. This “affect” is deeply Shakespearean: it is haunted, recursive, and structured by the sense that time is perpetually \u201cout of joint.\u201d During the past years, Shakespeare scholars have continuously suggested that Shakespeare games must adopt the practices of the stage. Elsinore <\/em>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<\/em> does beautifully.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Works Cited<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aarseth, Espen J. \u201cI fought the law: Transgressive play and the implied player.\u201d From literature to cultural literacy<\/em>. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. pp. 180-188.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bishop, Tom. \u201cShakespeare\u2019s Theater Games.\u201d Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies<\/em>, vol. 40, no. 1, Jan. 2010, pp. 65\u201388, https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1215\/10829636-2009-014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bloom, Gina. \u201cVideogame Shakespeare: Enskilling Audiences through Theater-Making Games.\u201d Shakespeare Studies<\/em>, vol. 43, 2015, pp. 114\u201319.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bushnell, Rebecca. \u201cTragedy and Temporality.\u201d Publications of the Modern Language Association of America<\/em> , vol. 129, no. 4, 2014, pp. 783\u201389, https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1632\/pmla.2014.129.4.783<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bushnell, Rebecca W. Tragic Time in Drama, Film, and Videogames: The Future in the Instant<\/em>. Springer Nature, 2016.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Packwood, Lewis. \u201c\u2018Shakespeare Would Be Writing for Games Today\u2019: Cannes\u2019 First Video Game Lili Is a Retelling of Macbeth.\u201d The Guardian<\/em>, Guardian News and Media, 22 May 2025, www.theguardian.com\/games\/2025\/may\/22\/shakespeare-cannes-first-video-game-lili-macbeth-rs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Petit, Carolyn. \u201cShaking up Shakespeare\u2019s Balance of Power in the Upcoming Game Elsinore.\u201d Feminist Frequency<\/em>, 10 Aug. 2016, feministfrequency.com\/2016\/04\/11\/shaking-up-shakespeares-balance-of-power-in-the-upcoming-game-elsinore\/<\/a>. Accessed on Jan 26, 2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Roberts-Smith, Jennifer, et al. \u201cStaging Shakespeare in Social Games: Towards a Theory of Theatrical Game Design Authors.\u201d Borrowers and Lenders<\/em>, vol. 10, no. 1, 2023, https:\/\/doi.org\/10.18274\/ZARB5225.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ruberg, Bo. \u201cPermalife: Video Games and the Queerness of Living.\u201d Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds<\/em>, vol. 9, no. 2, 2017, pp. 159\u2013173,  https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1386\/jgvw.9.2.159_1 <\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Way, Geoffrey. \u201cShakespeare Videogames, Adaptation\/Appropriation, and Collaborative Reception.\u201d Games and Theatre in Shakespeare\u2019s England<\/em>, edited by Gina Bloom et al., 1st ed., Routledge, 2021, pp. 255\u201373, https:\/\/doi.org\/10.5117\/9789463723251_CH10.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wilde, Poppy. Posthuman Gaming: Avatars, Gamers, and Entangled Subjectivities<\/em>. 1st ed., Taylor & Francis Group, 2023, https:\/\/doi.org\/10.4324\/9781003207191<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Worthen, William B. Drama: Between Poetry and Performance<\/em>. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Prepared for delivery at the Canadian Game Studies Association conference (CGSA), Spring 2026 In his 2010 essay, titled \u201cShakespeare\u2019s Theater Games,\u201d theater scholar Tom Bishop argues that \u201cthe 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\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":387,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n\u00a0\u201cThe Play Is the Thing\u201d: Repetition, Memory, and Tragic Time in Elsinore (Golden Glitch, 2019) - 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