Shakespeare, Game, and Play in Digital Pedagogical Shakespeare Games

Abstract

Shakespeare games are emerging as legitimate objects of study and pedagogy, but a survey of such games reveals that the marriage between “Shakespeare” and “game” is conceptually problematic, offering relatively narrow understandings of what a play by Shakespeare might be. We briefly identify two broad trends in digital pedagogical Shakespeare games before discussing how their reliance on the act of “play” and their favoring of Shakespeare as a textual ontology ignores the complexity of theatrical performance. We identify three overlooked complexities, the first giving rise to the other two: the audience’s contribution to theatre’s ontology, the different kinds of work that actors and spectators undertake in performance, and the primacy of collaborative ontogenesis in theatre over artifactual ontology.