https://mashable.com/article/royal-shakespeare-company-video-game-macbeth-lilli
I’ve seen multiple links about this upcoming Lady Macbeth game from the Royal Shakespeare Company, and I think I may have even posted about it in the past. But it seems closer now to reality, so I wanted to dig in deeper and see if there are some hints about how we’ll be able to play it. (Spoiler alert – alas, not yet.)
Lili has now been shown at Cannes and the Venice Film Festival, which I still don’t fully understand because isn’t it a videogame, not a film? Or is it really going to turn out to be a film that’s got just enough interactive elements that they’re pitching it as a game?
In Lili, one must enter a hacker’s den with a USB stick in hand, don headphones, and follow the poetic instructions of the Hecate collective — Macbeth’s three witches, reimagined here as hackers.
Ok, I’m with you so far. Are you this Lili character? She never actually interacts with the witches, so probably not.
Lili begins as an initiation, where the player is asked to take a vow and accept the hacker persona, giving you agency within a moral grey zone. One assumes control of the game’s surveillance technology to the fullest, as you have access to Lili’s personal documents like her marriage certificate, photos, and passport, and can tune into one of the three different CCTV cameras placed in her house as well as her phone and computer screens.
Ok, so we’re not Lili, we’re spying on Lili, which is cool from a game perspective. But I’m not sure who that makes us, and how it maps to Macbeth.
At one point, you are prompted by the Hecate witches to shut off Lili’s access to a YouTube makeup tutorial, just like the Iranian government can do it at any time. You can then control Lili’s VPN connection and, with that, the flow of information.
Again, interesting. Reminds me a little of the David Tennant / Patrick Stewart version of Hamlet, where they kept showing us angles through security cameras and really playing up the sense of paranoia. Here we’re taking that even further, it’s not just what Big Brother knows, it’s what power they have over things like your access to information.
But will we ever get to play this game? <starts skimming…>
The creators behind Lili are hoping to keep the momentum going to raise funds for the full version of the game,
Aw, man! So basically it’s still just a demo to be shopped around the festivals, and probably will be for some time. What a shame. The ideas sound fascinating, even if they’re not as directly related to Macbeth‘s text as one might hope. It does appear to be a VR game, regardless, so even if it does get made you’re presumably going to need an Oculus or something similar.
Still, we can hope! I’ve been doing the Shakespeare Geek thing for 25 years now and I’ve written about a whole lot of Shakespeare video games – some big, some small. Some made it out the door, some never did. Who knows where this one will end up.