With the release of Electronic Art’s Dante’s Inferno, a video game based on the Italian poet’s trip to the underworld, it is inevitable that other classic authors are looked to as sources for gaming inspiration. Indeed, as Jessica reported on The Standard earlier this week, Shakespeare has already had the video game treatment with the surprisingly addictive Romeo, Wherefore Art Thou Romeo, an initiative from the Shakespeare County tourist authority in the UK.
Dante’s Inferno is a considerably more extravagant affair and, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, its lead designer Jonathan Knight suggests that Shakespeare would have been at the forefront of game design, citing him as an innovator of stories, form and medium. Knight cannily notes that in all this innovation Shakespeare was also a rip-off merchant, being quids in by building on the work of others, q.v. Electronic Arts, Knight, and the first cantica of The Divine Comedy. Commenting on Shakespeare as game designer in the gaming blog, Kokatu, Stephen Totilo echoes the point, remarking that
And wouldn’t it be interesting to see a master of merging the highbrow and lowbrow making games — or is that exactly what we have already, perhaps, at work in studios around the world?
While I don’t like to indulge in the parlour game, what-if-Shakespeare-were-alive-today, I do agree with Knight and Totilo’s assessments of what the playwright was doing: innovating by ripping off the work of others to produce a new form which was increasingly popular and accessible.
Alongside the viral success of Romeo Wherefore Art Thou, Romeo and the success of Dante’s Inferno, assured if only by omnipresence in the Paris Metro, lies the question not of Shakespeare the gamer, but of Shakespeare the game and games inspired by the play. Forgive the failure of imagination, but as much as I see the affinities between the creative industries of the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries, the Shakespeare-inspired video game would seem to be something of a stretch.
The Inferno, with its perilous levels and with Virgil as a built in help, lends itself to the video game quest format in a way that the more complex and multi-character dramas of Shakespeare do not. With Dante’s poem, it is easy for this infrequent gamer to see how the player has to get to the bottom and then get the hell out of there. But Shakespeare offers no such simple “there-and-back” narratives. If the good folk at the Shakespeare County were being true to their product, their viral game would properly end with a double suicide, but “See Stratford and Die” just isn’t going to sell Warwickshire. Nor do I think that calling suicide “winning” would fly in Electronic Arts’ marketing department or, for that matter, homeland security departments. There might be more scope in the realm of the vast online multi-player role-playing games, but how to allow player freedom while sticking to the script?
These are questions that video game designers have to deal with if they are going to pursue adaptation. But tragic outcomes aside, they also point back to one of Shakespeare’s innovations, and the extraordinary interiority and depth of his characters when compared with their predecessors. They appear to have free will, make their own decisions and come with their own histories, whereas early plays do not.
Video games also offer an illusion of character and free will, but the source of illusion in a video game is very different to that of a play. “I move him with my thumbs” sings Owen Pallet in “He Poos Clouds,” so avid a gamer he performed under the name of one as Final Fantasy. With video games it is for the user to bring that depth and interiority by making the decisions. And the history, or backstory, is least dynamic part of the show, often seeming to come in a disguised slide-show before actual user interaction. Asked about what he could not use in his game from Dante’s poem, Knight’s reply is telling.
I would have liked to include a lot more back stories about some of the minor characters … But we can’t tell players to stop and listen to someone tell a story.
With Shakespeare and drama in general, it’s all about the story. It is through this that character is explored, not by a game designer at one end of a process and a gamer at the other, but by one mind bringing the two together. And, for all their apparent free will, the characters meet their ends not because they chose them, but because it’s written that way. Thus, in the putative Shakespeare video game, the gamer’s life is simpler than Hamlet’s; the gamer has only Shakespeare conspiring against him to provide story, character, and, well, even a script.
This stronger connection between story and character in drama is perhaps the reason why video games hold little appeal for me. They tantalize with narrative, but are about action, often for the sake of action. They suggest free will, but ultimately it is my will and the laws created by programmers that limit the character, who is neither me nor the representation of another to arouse my curiosity. Rather, there is a tour guide-like cypher to guide me round the perils of Dante’s Hell, Las Vegas, the future, wherever might be interesting place to visit if only they hadn’t killed the backstory.
The tour guide does suggest one way in which games might illuminate the historically minded Shakespeare student. By re-creating sixteenth century London as a game it would be possible animate many of the contexts which academics labour over to illuminate Shakespeare’s plays. The discipline could be called Neo-Historicism.
I would love to hear from gamers and game designers, more expert than I in the narrative plasticity of video games and the development of their characters. Tell me why I’m wrong and why Shakespeare is ripe for video game adaptation.
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