For former University of Iowa professor Gina Bloom, teaching Shakespeare is an evolving process. That’s why she brought Play the Knave, a motion-capture video game that she helped develop, to the UI.
Bloom showcased the video game at a Sept. 7 event in the Main Library as part of the semester-long Shakespeare at Iowa celebration. Students and faculty had an opportunity to play the game, which allows players to perform scenes from Shakespeare plays by using a Kinect sensor to capture their movements, then animating their digital avatars. While the Kinect is best known as an attachment to the Xbox gaming console, Play the Knave operates using a Kinect camera connected to a computer.
“I think of the Kinect as a very theatrical peripheral,” says Bloom. “The technology lends itself well to theater, and making a theater game for Kinect was a very natural process.”
Bloom, an associate professor of English at the University of California, Davis since 2007, is the project director for Play the Knave. When Teresa Mangum, director of the UI Obermann Center, and Bloom’s former colleague, learned about the game, she thought it would be a great addition to the Shakespeare at Iowa event lineup and reached out.
The Shakespeare at Iowa celebration, hosted by UI Libraries, is a special exhibition of Shakespeare’s First Folio and a statewide celebration to mark the 400th anniversary of the writer’s death. The First Folio, printed in 1623, is a rare volume containing a collection of Shakespeare’s plays, including many that were printed for the first time. The First Folio is on display free of charge and open to the public in the UI Main Library Gallery until Sept. 25.
Bloom has been developing the game at ModLab, an experimental laboratory for media research and digital humanities at UC Davis. ModLab consists of UC Davis faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates representing various majors and departments, from English to computer science to cultural studies.
Bloom, whose academic areas of focus include early modern drama, theater history, and digital arts and humanities, envisions the game as a teaching tool.
“Both in formal and informal education contexts, the game gives people a chance to understand Shakespeare by performing the plays,” says Bloom. “Most people aren’t going to perform the plays on their own, so the game becomes the gateway to performing and understanding Shakespeare.”
Bloom has already incorporated the current version of the game into her classes at UC Davis, where her students edit scenes, perform them, and then discuss their interpretations.
The game isn’t available to the public just yet—it’s still a work in progress as Bloom and her team continue to add features and fix bugs. If everything goes according to plan, they’ll release the game this fall on Steam, a digital distribution platform where users can download and play video games. Play the Knave first will be submitted to Steam Greenlight, a service that allows Steam users to vote on games they would like to see added to the platform. If it earns enough votes, Play the Knave will be made available for download.
“Since the idea is for schools to purchase the game as a teaching tool, we wanted it to be affordable,” says Bloom. “To run Play the Knave, you would need a Kinect camera, a PC or other computer that runs the Windows operating system, an adapter to connect the two, and the game itself. The camera, adapter, and game together will cost about $150.”
While dozens of UI students got to play the game in the Main Library, Bloom says the event also focused on bringing Shakespeare’s work back to the theater.
“I think it’s great to be a part of the celebration with the First Folio exhibit. The First Folio’s historical importance is that it’s a book; it emphasizes that Shakespeare is meant to be read,” says Bloom. “In some ways, what we offer is a reminder that the First Folio only exists because the plays existed in the theater first. The stage was and remains vital to the life of these plays, and it’s important to keep that view in the conversation.”