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Building Video Game Adaptations of Dramatic and Literary Texts

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Research Methods for the Digital Humanities

Abstract

This chapter offers a step-by-step method for adapting a dramatic or literary source into a short video game. The author explains how adapting a source text into a video game enables a researcher to illuminate themes, character insights, or plot elements with new emphasis. To illustrate the method she proposes, the author gives examples from Something Wicked, her video game adaptation of William Shakespeare’s gory, witchy tragedy, Macbeth. Users of this constructionist methodology create projects the public can use. Particularly in a classroom setting, this public impact encourages researchers to invest more energy and substantive analytical interrogation than might characterize a traditional research paper.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Matt Ratto , “Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life,” Information Society 27, no. 4 (2011): 252–260, https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2011.583819.

  2. 2.

    Seymour Papert, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (New York: Basic Books, 1980).

  3. 3.

    Jessica Lahey, “To Help Students Learn, Engage the Emotions,” New York Times, http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/05/04/to-help-students-learn-engage-the-emotions; Helen Immordino-Yang, Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016).

  4. 4.

    Something Wicked , the lab’s first project, was made possible by a crowdfunding campaign. Crowdfunding campaigns are complex and time-consuming, and beyond the scope of this chapter. Any teams considering crowdfunding should research the process thoroughly. Major sites like Indiegogo and Kickstarter offer suggestions and tutorials, and alternatives to these sites crop up frequently.

  5. 5.

    “Beauty.AI Announces the First International Beauty Contest Judged by an Artificial Intelligence Jury,” PRWeb, November 19, 2015, http://www.prweb.com/releases/2015/11/prweb13088208.htm.

  6. 6.

    Sam Levin, “A Beauty Contest Was Judged by AI and the Robots Didn’t Like Dark Skin,” The Guardian, September 8, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/08/artificial-intelligence-beauty-contest-doesnt-like-black-people.

  7. 7.

    Twine is a free, online, and easy-to-use tool for nonlinear storytelling. Links to Twine and other game-building tools appear at the end of the chapter.

  8. 8.

    “The Bias Blind Spot and Unconscious Bias in Design,” The Interaction Design Foundation, accessed October 3, 2017, https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/the-bias-blind-spot-and-unconscious-bias-in-design.

  9. 9.

    David Ball, Backwards and Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983).

  10. 10.

    Jesse Schell, The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2010).

  11. 11.

    Marvin Carlson, “Semiotics and Its Heritage,” in Critical Theory and Performance, ed. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R Roach (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 13–25.

  12. 12.

    Perhaps the best-known contemporary example of “translating” Shakespeare’s language is the No Fear Shakespeare series, which provides Shakespeare’s “original” dialogue on the left side of the page, with a version on the right in “the kind of English people actually speak today.” “No Fear Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Plays Plus a Modern Translation You Can Understand,” accessed October 6, 2017, http://nfs.sparknotes.com/.

  13. 13.

    A longer explanation of the impossibility of an original, authoritative Shakespearean text is beyond the scope of this chapter. Intrigued readers should begin with Stephen Orgel’s excellent Authentic Shakespeare and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage (Florence: Taylor & Francis, 2013).

  14. 14.

    My favorite informal feedback was from two ten-year-olds who happened to be on-site during a playtest. They informed us that, though they had not yet read any of Shakespeare’s plays, they did know his name. After playing Something Wicked , they told us they did not realize Shakespeare plays would have “awesome fighting.”

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

    E. B. Hunter

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  1. E. B. Hunter
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Correspondence to E. B. Hunter .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Levenberg Services, Inc., Bloomingburg, NY, USA

    lewis levenberg

  2. Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Tai Neilson

  3. The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX, USA

    David Rheams

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Hunter, E.B. (2018). Building Video Game Adaptations of Dramatic and Literary Texts. In: levenberg, l., Neilson, T., Rheams, D. (eds) Research Methods for the Digital Humanities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96713-4_10

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