Playful Shakespeare: games, drama and literature in education

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This project is a collaboration between the Institute of Education, Shakespeare's Globe, and Immersive Education. Its main objective is to develop an authoring tool which children and young people can use to make their own 3-D computer games adapted from Shakespeare plays. The purpose of this is threefold. Firstly, it provides the possibility for young people to encounter Shakespeare in a cultural environment familiar to them. Secondly, it offers new ways to approach the teaching of Shakespeare, building on recent research which identifies similarities between computer games and educational drama. Like theatre (and Shakespeare's Globe in particular, perhaps), games construct an imaginary world, peopled with fictional representations of human agency (avatars), whose movements and actions can be structured both around narrative sequences and around player choices. The alternative routes available to players will allow the young game designers to consider how choices (social, moral, strategic) are open to Shakespeare's characters: should Prospero visit revenge on Ferdinand, or allow him to love Miranda? Should Hamlet kill Claudius at prayer or defer his revenge? Should Oberon release Titania from her cruel enchantment, or enjoy her misfortune a little longer? The authoring tool will allow young designers to construct something very like a theatrical interpretation of the play, with characters, sets, script and actions; but a play which its audience can interact with.This project is a short pilot, using The Tempest as the basis for a trial. A pack of assets will be created for the game authoring package Missionmaker (Immersive Education). It will be tested by an Advanced Skills Teachers in English, Drama and Media, with a group of students from a Year 8 class in a secondary school. The results of the trial will be presented by the students and debated by teachers, Shakespeare specialists, researchers, publishers and game designers, at a seminar at Shakespeare's Globe. The outcomes will be published as an academic article and an article for the professional journal of the National Association for the Teaching of English.If successful, the team will explore the possibility of further game-authoring kits for young people to make adaptations of other Shakespeare plays, as well as other works of English literature which might benefit from this approach, such as Beowulf, Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Tennyson's Lady of Shalott.