This stems a bit from the Performance thread, but it’s long been a curious interest of mine.  Imagine a Star Trek world where immersive-reality experiences like the Holodeck are possible.  Or, if you don’t want to go that far, just consider any of the well regarded “first person interactive” games that are all the rage today.  A game in which you play a role, and you will interact with computer-controlled characters to tell a story. How does Shakespeare fit into that? I’m not the only designer to dream of a world where you could insert yourself as Hamlet among a bunch of computer-controlled Claudii and Opheliae. If you want to just act the role, as if you were part of any other stage production? Then sure, no biggie, you’re following a script. But what if you didn’t?  What if the play was going on around you, and you inserted yourself as some random spear carrier?  And then, right in the middle of the story, you jump out and kill the king yourself? At that point, of course, it’s not Shakespeare. But that’s what I want to discuss – how much did it lose?  If you consider the possibility of changing the story, then have you effectively said that it’s no longer Shakespeare, it’s either all or nothing?  Or is there still some value there, some very high value at that, in using Shakespeare as the foundation for what becomes a whole new story? This is different, by the way, from any random fiction writer who decides to do some Shakespeare fan fiction.  I’m talking specifically about the immersive experience of living out a story alongside the characters of Shakespeare.  Would that be huge?  Or would it lose all essence of what Shakespeare was all about?

So as not to spoil the fun, I’ll post the answers here – but in the first comment, not in the main body.  So don’t click through until you’re ready to see them. If you clicked straight into this message then you’ll probably see the comments anyway, which is why I put the spoiler warning in the title like that.  If you’re browsing the home page and this is the first post you’re seeing, don’t click for the answers yet, scroll down until you find the actual game and then give it a shot.

I first posted about this game way back in 2005, but it’s fun to bring back old posts from time to time because my readership right now is much higher than it was then. Ok, here’s a game that I just thought up while decoding some filenames on my computer. How well do you know your Shakespeare canon? Can you tell the title of a play just by the first letters? For instance TTOHPOD is The Tragedy Of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Every word (including the/a/of…) is included. Got it? Good.
TT
TTGOV
PPOT
AMND
TTOOTMOV
TLOTOA
TNOWYW
C
LLL
MFM
TFPOHTF
TSPOHTF
TLADOKJ
TTOC
TFHOTLOKHTE Not all the plays are listed, in case that is not obvious.

Maybe we’re not all students anymore, maybe some of us are, but there are always times in our lives when we need to study – for a test, for a job interview, for a presentation.  How do you do it? Trevor sent me this article from the NY Times on new research in study habits, which busts some myths about different kinds of learners, finding a specific study place, and others. Personally, I was always a lousy study.  I tended to be among the advanced students during school (up to college, at least), so I would often do much of my homework during down time at school, leaving nothing for actual home.  When it came time to study for tests, I …didn’t, really.  I was always a believer that either I had internalized the information, or I didn’t, and no amount of cramming would fix it. Sure I crammed, I read my notes over and over while always thinking “Ok, I knew this 5 minutes ago because I just re-read it 10 minutes ago, that doesn’t really say much about whether I’ll still remember it tomorrow morning.”  And, predictably, some courses I aced (the ones I’d internalized), some I failed no matter how much I studied. How about you? What can we say about study habits that might specifically apply to Shakespeare?  An old post of mine on how to memorize Shakespeare remains one of my most popular, but that’s not really all there is to it, is there? I’ve known people that can recite the words and still not tell you the plot. I don’t know how to *teach* kids this, but I know that for me that breakthrough moment came when I was able to shatter this idea of “deciphering a series of words and translating them into something I can understand” and started seeing actual people, just like me, who were expressing what was happening to them (the famous example being Hamlet’s “thrice-baked meats did coldly furnish forth the wedding tables” joke I’ve retold many times over the years).  I’ve always said that were I to write a study guide for Hamlet I’d start it like this:  Hamlet’s dad died.  Let that sink in.  Kids have dads.  Heck, some kids might well have dads that died.  So did Hamlet.  Regardless of what he said or when he said it or who wrote it for him or why or what was going on politically at the time, the reason that it survives is because, underneath at all, Hamlet is a young man whose father died, and anybody can relate to that (or at least attempt to, which is close enough). Ok, that was a bit of a tangent.  Somebody else go.

It comes up a lot.  It came up on Twitter just now.  Shakespeare is meant to be seen, not read. Which implies that it is meant to be performed, so that people can see i. But what exactly does that mean, and how can we work with it? On the one end there’s the class field trip, packing up a few dozen kids to head down to the local theatre and sit still for a production of it doesn’t matter what because most of them won’t pay attention long enough to remember it. Or, there’s “see the movie.”  Stay in the classroom, maybe you have the students’ attention, maybe you don’t, but when Olivier’s Hamlet says goodbye to his mom a little bit too enthusiastically, you can pause it for a minute and explain the who Oedipus thing (thank you Mr. Corey, my 12th grade English teacher). But can we take it another level?  A large majority of kids have iPods, or at least computer access at home (barring the edge socio-economic situations where it’s not likely). Couldn’t they download the movie and watch it at their own pace, rewinding as needed? What about looking forward when most students are packing an iPad-like tablet device? I like to imagine a world where the student has a player that shows everything they might want – the text, the footnotes, a modern translation, as well as multiple performance interpretations of each scene.  Want to study the final scene of Lear?  Great, drill down right on that.  See Olivier do it, and then James Earl Jones, and then Ian McKellan. Read the notes.  Form your own opinions. You just can’t do that stuff by simply going out and seeing the show just to say you saw it.  Sure, “live” theatre brings something different than a film does, but that’s a bigger question that really has nothing to do with Shakespeare but does have everything to do with the realities of time management in a busy world.  I don’t think it’s as easy as “see rather than read.”  I think that a combination of both is the only real option, and technology is getting us closer to it.