Gaming the Stage (University of Michigan Press, July 2018) by English professor Gina Bloom explains that theaters succeeded in London's 16th- and 17th-century entertainment marketplace largely because watching a play and playing a game were similar experiences. Audiences were encouraged to "play the play," and knowledge of gaming helped them become better theatergoers. Examining dramas written for these theaters alongside evidence of analog games popular then and today, Bloom argues for games as theatrical media and theater as an interactive gaming technology.

Gina Bloom joined the UC Davis English faculty in 2007 and has since become affiliated faculty with the PhD programs in Education and Performance Studies. Her first book, Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, Material Texts series, 2007), won the award for best book of the year from the The Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. Her second book, Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theater, is published by the University of Michigan Press (Theater: History/Text/Performance series). Thanks to the TOME Initiative at the UC Davis Library, the book is available open access. Bloom also co-edited (with Tom Bishop and Erika T. Lin) Games and Theatre in Shakespeare's England (part of the Cultures of Play, 1300-1700, series from Amsterdam University Press).

Digital projects include essays in the Folger Luminary iPad app for Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream and a collaborative project (with students and faculty in the UCD ModLab) to produce and study a Shakespeare video game, Play the Knave. Currently, Bloom is currently working with teachers in Cape Town South Africa to explore how the game, as a tool for digitally mediated theatrical performance, can support decoloniality in secondary schools. An article she co-authored with South African high school educator and artist Lauren Bates called "Play to Learn: Shakespeare Games as Decolonial Praxis in South African Schools" was recently published in the journal Shakespeare in Southern Africa.

View the book at University of Michigan Press