Everyone knows the playwright William Shakespeare. Maybe you’ve seen a live performance or caught a film adaptation, or more likely, you were forced to read Shakespeare in school. But have you played Shakespeare?

Well, with point-and-click adventure games like Elsinore, a time-traveling adaptation of Hamlet, or the comedic text-adventure A Midsummer Night’s Choice, you can. From video games and apps to board games and card games, there are many ways to learn about and interact with Shakespeare’s works. 

Introducing: Play the Knave, a Shakespeare-themed video game developed at the College of Letters and Science in collaboration with the College of Engineering, both at UC Davis. In Play the Knave, players direct scenes from Shakespeare’s plays, controlling everything from the actors to the stage itself. 

After seven years in development at UC Davis’ ModLabs, an experimental laboratory researching digital media and new technologies, Play the Knave was released in 2020. The game was created not just to entertain but also as an immersive learning tool.

“Performing helps you understand the play,” said English Professor Gina Bloom, Play the Knave’s project director and a Shakespeare specialist. “They weren’t meant to be read, they were always performed.”

By giving students creative freedom, they can make Shakespeare’s texts their own.

The gamification of Shakespeare

When Play the Knave was first in development, the ModLabs team didn’t have a Shakespeare specialist. Bloom, who is interested in the connection between games and theater, was excited to get on board. During that time, she was doing research for her book Gaming the Stage, in which she argues theatre was the first form of interactive play. 

Bloom incorporates Shakespeare games into several of her courses to help give students a new perspective on the bard’s plays. She’s published multiple works on Shakespeare video games, such as the 2015 paper Videogame Shakespeare: Enskilling Audiences through Theater-Making Games discussing how video games draw out the interactive qualities of Shakespeare. 

While video games can be used to teach Shakespeare, they often focus less on Shakespeare's plays as an interactive experience and more on the narrative, according to Bloom. Some take creative liberties with his works, using them to create a new story or embedding them with a new meaning, but Bloom believes you can also transform a play just by performing it.

In Play the Knave, players “put their own stamp on the plays,” said Bloom, “whether through the avatar they choose, through the movements they have their avatars do, or through the inflection in their voices.”

How to ‘Play the Knave’

Play the Knave is played similarly to games like Just Dance. Rather than using a controller, players physically act out the scenes. Using an Xbox Kinect motion sensor and their body as the controller, players direct avatars and voice characters. They have a huge cast of avatars to select from, including Roman senators, office workers and aliens. 

From iconic plays like Macbeth to his more obscure works like Coriolanus, players can choose from hundreds of Shakespeare scripts. They can also upload their own text using Play the Knave’s “Mekanimator Scriptmaker” tool. 

Players can perform on four different stages: The Queen’s College Temporary Stage, the Rose Theatre, the Container Globe, or the Stratford Festival Stage. They can choose from a wide variety of background soundtracks and original compositions to set the tone.

“Any game about Shakespeare has to teach and make available to players the experience of being in a play, and that means all of its components,” Bloom said. 

When they’re performing up on stage, players may notice cues they would never have picked up on if they were just reading Shakespeare, or they may notice a pun that could only be heard and felt when it’s spoken out loud. Play the Knave transforms Shakespeare by giving students control over his plays.

Bloom believes Shakespeare’s texts too often sit on a pedestal. “You need to knock him down,” said Bloom. “Students need to have a sense of ownership of the material. They have to feel like they can make it their own.”

Play the Knave flips the hierarchy of the classroom by turning Shakespeare’s plays from a serious performance to a silly, low-key experience. The video game makes performing Shakespeare fun and accessible. 

“They're not actors and it's hard for them to enact a play, so you don't want them to take it so seriously that they are intimidated by it," Bloom said.

Setting the stage for future projects

Bloom is interested in taking Play the Knave in new directions. 

While the game was originally developed for Xbox Kinect, the console is no longer in production. So, ModLabs is porting the game to VR. Play the Knave VR will offer all the same features as the original version but with one major change: the game will have fully immersive stages. When you’re playing the game, it will really feel like you’re up on stage. Currently, Bloom is using a beta version of Play the Knave VR in her classrooms but, when it is ready, it will be released to the public. 

“It’s Shakespeare for everyone,” Bloom said.

Those curious about Play the Knave can learn more in the book Experimenting with Shakespeare: Games and Play in the Laboratory. The book explores how ModLabs’s improvisatory methods led to the creation of Play the Knave and how video games can be used to explore disciplines. Bloom’s co-authors on the book include Professor Colin Milburn, the Gary Snyder Chair in Science and the Humanities and director of the UC Davis ModLabs and Center for Artificial Intelligence and Experimental Futures; Evan Buswell, a recent graduate of the Cultural Studies Ph.D. program at UC Davis; and Nick Toothman, a graduate of the computer science Ph.D. program who is now an assistant professor of computer science at California State University, Bakersfield. 

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