Spring 2019, in my ENG 105: Expository Writing course, I taught Ryan North’s adaptation of Hamlet called: To Be or Not to Be: A Chooseable-Path Adventure. This presentation will touch upon that fact that when the project launched on Kickstarter in 2013, it became the number-one most funded publishing project ever. I will also touch upon the fact that Shakespeare may have been the greatest plagiarist of all time, a fact that North mentions in the Intro.
My students had the option of playing the “game-book” version or reading the novel. And just in case they were really thrown off by the non-traditional novel structure, we watched the film Black Mirror: Bandersnatch as a class, where students made choices about which paths to take. My presentation will include anonymous student reaction, which was predictably mixed. Students seemed to appreciate the structure of the assignment, despite their mixed feelings about the content.
I will conclude by talking about the course I am teaching in Fall 2019, that will closely analyze other new media success stories like Amanda Palmer’s “The Art of Asking,” web-comics such as Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (2002-), crowd-sourced art projects like HitRecord (2005,2010) and ExplodingDog (2000-2015), web-based film and tv such as Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along-Blog (2008) and Broad City (2009-2011), internet sensations like The Oatmeal (2009) and XKCD: Volume 0 (2009).
About the presenterDanielle S. Ely
Danielle S. Ely received her Master’s Degree in English Literature from The College of Saint Rose in 2011. She teaches Composition and Literature at Dutchess Community College. She is currently the Vice President of the International David Foster Wallace Society and lives in upstate NY.