Shakespeare’s presence in the world of video games is small but growing as video game developers increasingly recognize that the programming skills necessary to create a visually attractive game must be linked with the narrative skills that one can find in, among others, Shakespeare (Bissell). That said, to date video games tend to engage Shakespeare in a cursory or desultory manner, offering citation that contextualizes Shakespeare as “high art” as opposed to the popular culture that is the video game. The Elder Scrolls Online, LA Noire, Silent Hill, and even the iPhone game Hamlet! all cite Shakespeare yet tend to do so in a metonymic manner – revealing something about the character through the citation. Other games however use Shakespeare to provide meta-generic critique. In the game Mass Effect, a performance of Hamlet is advertised repeatedly, put on by a cast who are all Elcor, a race of elephantine aliens who preface all statements with a description of the emotion they are feeling and who speak in a slow, monotonous drone. Rather than merely a citation that reinforces the high/low culture distinction, Mass Effect’s admittedly tangential use of Shakespeare opens up possibilities for complex readings of the player/actor and the value of “realism” in voice-acting. Hamlet the Video Game does not exist, yet that is because game designers are appropriating Shakespeare to make far more subtle points about the nature of identity than would be possible by merely replicating the story of Hamlet in a different medium.
About the presenterAndrew Bretz
Andrew Bretz is a post-doctoral fellow with the Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project, having received his doctorate at the University of Guelph in 2012. His dissertation, which he is turning into a book, was on the representation of the figure of the rapist on the early modern stage. He has been published in Notes and Queries, Modern Philology, and has an upcoming edition of Midsummer Night’s Dream published by Oxford University Press (Canada) in 2015.