Playing Beowulf: Gaming the Library

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This project will develop a game-authoring tool based on the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf, for use by literature students, curators and library visitors. It will enable them to transform the poem into a digital game, interpreting the text into playable characters, landscapes and events. This will allow curators of literary treasures at the British Library to design digital game experiences of the Beowulf manuscript, the only copy of which is held at the British Library. It will also however allow visitors, students and schoolchildren to design their own games, thus producing an example of co-curatorship through a digital environment. The games will be screen-based, playable on computers, tablets and online. However, the use of arduino control boards will allow the game to control external environments and vice versa, allow the game events to connect with dramatic enactment of the poem by participants. This vision of 'gaming the library' will explore how literary treasures can be engaged with in dramatized library spaces connected to game environments.Beowulf is chosen for three reasons. Firstly, it was one of the first major digitisation projects of the British Library - so this project can extend its history of digital adaptation into forms of game narrative and dramatic action. Secondly, it belongs to a narrative tradition which has strongly influenced the videogame designs of the last twenty years: archaic and mediaeval-themed fantasy games often deriving from Tolkien's stories, themselves drawing on Old English and Scandinavian poems and sagas. For Anglo-Saxon scholars and HE English students, adaptation of Beowulf into a videogame opens up ways of reinterpreting the poem, and connecting it to contemporary popular cultural contexts. Thirdly, Beowulf is a popular text in translation for secondary schools at Key Stage 3. If students are able to explore the poem through drama and videogame design, they also will make connections between this archaic form of narrative and their own gaming cultures. They can also explore in close detail the narrative, and even selections of the original text, such as the ambiguous term 'aglaeca', used both of Beowulf and Grendel's mother, but often differently translated to signify hero in one case and monster in the other. This ambiguity can translate into morphing visual characters, shifting point-of-view, and even spoken dialogue in their game designs.The project is a collaboration between five partners. The Institute of Education's specialists in English, Drama and Media will lead, organising workshops for PGCE trainee teachers in drama and game design, and overseeing how those trainees replicate these experiences with their secondary school students. These activities will be supported by Anglo-Saxon scholars at UCL, who will also run workshops for undergraduates, and contribute to the scholarly effort to consider what game adaptation can contribute to the interpretation of Beowulf. The British Library will co-design the game-authoring tool, ensuring its suitability for curators and library visitors, and collaborating in the organisation of an international conference on Literature, Drama and Game at the BL's conference centre. They will also run Young Researchers game design workshops for London teenagers. They will also host a Digital Conversation on the use of games in libraries and the GLAM sector. The fourth partner is the University of Sydney, where specialists in educational drama and videogames will replicate the UK school workshops, and contribute to the interpretation of the pedagogic benefits of this activity. Finally, the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park will host two workshops using the tool with young people in an informal coding club. The objective here will be to link this kind of narrative adaptation to programming skills, asking how coding meets narrative: or more generally, how the pedagogies of the book arts meet those of computer science.