I’m not quite sure what to do with this offering from a site called Game Playwright, which in itself seems highly cool to me:
In these pages, you’ll find definitions of nine critical story beats. You’ll read about the relationships between those beats. You’ll also find complete analyses of three stories you know already—Hamlet, Casablanca, and Dr. No—to show you how the system works.
Written with roleplayers in mind, Hamlet’s Hit Points is an indispensable tool for understanding stories, in games and everywhere else.
I’ve often brainstormed on the ideas of using Shakespeare’s characters as fodder for computer games of various sorts, so this fascinates me. In my version, computer AI has developed to a high enough degree that you could essentially “seed” your Hamlets and Ophelias and watch the play (the plot, at least) run through on its own sort of auto pilot. Then insert the player character and watch to see how he can disrupt the proceedings. This book looks like it’s geared toward game designers, but it seems like the sort of thing any random Shakespeare geek might be fascinated by. [ Spotted via Steve’s Gamer Blog ]