I don't know why it chose to do some double-spacing and some single, but in any case, here it is!
Paul Bills
Dr. Gideon Burton
English 382
22 March 2013
“Such Stuff as
Dreams are Made On”: Shakespeare and the Cultural Legitimacy of Video Games
For
several years, the debate has raged over “video games as art.” Roger Ebert, the
acclaimed film critic, famously declared on his blog for the Chicago Sun-Times that “in principle video games cannot be art” (“Video games” 2010,
emphasis in original). Ebert ranked up 4,936 comments from readers responding
to this post, the overwhelming majority “united in opposition” against him (“Play”
2010). For many, video games won the battle in 2011 when the US Supreme Court
overturned a California law banning violent video games, with Justice Scalia
writing for the majority that “like the protected books, plays, and movies that
preceded them, video games communicate ideas—and even social messages—through
many familiar literary devices (such as characters, dialogue, plot, and music)
and through features distinctive to the medium (such as the player's interaction
with the virtual world)” (Sutter 2011). Despite the Supreme Court ruling,
however the debate rages on.
In addition to expressing
“social messages” and expressing ideas, video games have already shown that
they can certainly move people as much as any art—again, like Justice Scalia
said, “through features distinctive to the medium.” Some of the most
talked-about games in this debate recently include Fumito Ueda’s Ico
and Shadow of the Colossus,
Thatgamecompany’s Journey, Irrational
Games’s Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite, and Valve’s Portal and Portal 2. All of these games do new and powerful things with the
interactivity of their medium to enhance the emotional effects of the story. In
Ico, the player controls a boy who
tries to get himself and a girl out of a castle safely. The main action of the
game is to reach out and grab the girl’s hand to take her along. The act of
deciding when and why to do this each time is an emotional experience within
the game that could not be experienced in the same way in another medium. Chris
Suellentrop writes “My first time
doing it gave me goosebumps: I am with her. I am not alone” (2011). Journey’s artwork is highly stylized and the musical score was the first ever
from a video game to be nominated for a Grammy. Matt Miller writes “Each time
[I played Journey], without fail,
individual moments (particularly the final level) managed to give me
goosebumps, and those moments have remained on my mind for weeks afterward”
(2012). Adam Sessler said of Bioshock Infinite’s story and world,
“It only can work as a game. The unique agency and complicity of the player in
the game's narrative is part of its commentary. This isn't a game filled with
player choice. But it is the best game about the choices we make as a person
and a people, their consequences, and their uncertainty of absolution..."
(2013). Even the much-debated “Citizen Kane moment” question, the assertion
that video games do not yet have a work that defines the medium like Orson
Welles’s 1941 masterpiece did for film, may now be closed. As one reviewer put
it: “So, when will gaming have its Citizen Kane moment? Forget
that. When will anything else have its BioShock Infinite moment?” (GamesTM
2013).
Most
surprisingly, one game even saved a boy’s life. Draven Miltenberger played the
old versions of the popular game Tomb Raider growing
up, before abuse, abandonment, and other family problems sent him on a
depressive downward spiral. He considered thoughts of suicide after dropping
out of high school—until he heard about the new Tomb Raider game released this year. He waited anxiously and got the game as soon
as it came out. In the game, when the protagonist Lara Croft performs her first
kill, she breaks down crying at the shock of it before shaking it off and
getting up to carry on. As Draven watched this, he realized something about his
own life. “Just because life had started off with a wreck doesn't mean I
wouldn't survive it,” he said (Hernandez). All of these powerful emotional
reactions came from the way the player interacted with the story, and would not
have been as powerful had that interaction been cut off by presenting the story
through some other medium.
In a
follow-up reconciliation post, Ebert conceded he was wrong to judge video games
without ever playing them himself, but maintained that he believed in principle
and theory it just didn’t work for video games. Interestingly, he cited a
conversation with filmmaker and game auteur Clive Barker where they ran into
discussing Romeo and Juliet. “Sooner
[or] later,” he writes on his blog, “these arguments all get around to
Shakespeare, and have a way of running aground on him” (“Play” 2010). While
Shakespeare has gained status as a sort of patron saint of “art” in our
culture, he didn’t always enjoy that privilege. In his own time, the Bard wrote
in a medium dismissed as mere spectacle and show much like video games now.
Shakespeare himself, I will argue, would go beyond the “art” argument and
instead just show how video games can explore themes, emotions, and topics at
least as well as any other medium, and for that reason they should be as
culturally legitimate as any other form of expression. I will then show how The Tempest—Shakespeare’s final,
fantastic work about a self-made sorcerer living in exile and seeking
revenge—could better be explored and studied if it were developed as a video
game.
Video
games are fighting much the same battle today that theater itself was fighting
in Shakespeare’s day. Shakespeare’s theater in his own time was literally not
much removed from such cheap entertainments as bear baiting, thus Shakespeare’s
famous stage direction from The Winter’s
Tale: “Exit, pursued by a bear” (3.3). Just like those concerned California
parents who wanted to ban video games, in Shakespeare’s time civic officials
often petitioned the royal council to abolish drama altogether, causing
Shakespeare and other dramatists to build their theaters outside the
jurisdiction of London itself (“Theater” xxxv). Similar to video games’ enemies
today, drama’s opponents in Shakespeare’s day objected to plays on both moral
and academic levels. Stephen Gosson wrote in 1579 a lament on the destruction
of England’s dignity by way of plays. He argued that Ovid’s theater “chargeth
his pilgrims to creep close to the Saints whom they serve” but in the theaters
of his London he saw only “such heaving and showing, such itching and
shouldering to sit by women …[and about a half page more of other examples]
that it is a right comedy to mark their behaviour” (Harrison 133). In Sir
Philip Sidney’s “Apology for Poetry” he claimed that “our tragedies and
comedies (not without cause cried out against), observ[e]…rules neither of honest
civility nor of skillful poetry” (Harrison 134). In Sidney’s view in 1580, only
one English play could claim status as true tragedy—Gorboduc, the earliest known tragedy in the English language
written by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton around 1560. While we revere
Shakespeare in our time perhaps more than any other playwright in history,
Shakespeare wrote those same plays we now know and love in an intellectual
warzone.
Shakespeare
himself complicates the debate about “art” in The Tempest. Look how Shakespeare plays with several definitions of
art in the following lines from Act
1, Scene 2:
my daughter, who
Art ignorant of what thou art,...
Lie there, my art. Wipe thou thine eyes; have comfort.
The direful spectacle of the wreck, which touch'd
The very virtue of compassion in thee,
I have with such provision in mine art
So safely ordered that there is no soul—
No, not so much perdition as an hair
Betid to any creature in the vessel
Which thou heard'st cry, which thou saw'st sink.
(20-21, 31-39)
The word art is used ten times in
this single scene, and never with the typical definition of creative
expression. Indeed, “art” as we think of it today wasn’t totally solidified as
a concept until Immanuel Kant and other thinkers defined it in the 18th
century, and Shakespeare obviously played with the many meanings it carried in
his time here. From my reading, in the lines above, Shakespeare uses three
different definitions for art: (1)
art as in "are" ("thou art"), (2) art as in witchcraft or
power ("in mine art"), and an interestingly metaphorical use
referring, perhaps, to our standard expression "art," but meaning
more literally, "creation" or "product" ("lie there,
my art"). Later in the same scene, we even have Prospero say he was well
versed in the "liberal arts" (1.2.91), yet another definition of art
not quite the traditional definition.
In the rest of The
Tempest, the word art keeps
popping up, with at least two more additional definitions. In Act 4, we get
perhaps the closest to today’s typical definition of art: “for I must / Bestow upon the eyes of this young couple / Some
vanity of mine art: it is my promise, / And they expect it from me” (4.1.42-44).
Shakespeare uses art here in the same
way as definition (2) above, but adding to it the idea of “vanity” gives the
sense of aesthetics that we know attach to the term. Finally, the word art is used in a totally new way in the
play’s epilogue: “Now I want / Spirits to enforce, art to enchant, / And my
ending is despair, / Unless I be relieved by prayer,” (5.1.13-16). Here again, the definition of art is related to definition (2) above,
but now means more directly "ability" or "capability."
Shakespeare knew well the debate surrounding his own works and his medium, and
while he may not have been directly commenting on this debate by blurring the
definition of art so purposely in The
Tempest, it is interesting that the very word we’ve attached such value to
and labeled his works with so often is a word he purposely exploited for its
varied and inconsistent definitions. If Shakespeare could add his voice to the
current debate surrounding video games as art, he just might ignore the word art completely because he knew well the
risks of the word.
The debate, then, is not really
about art, but perhaps more about a sense of cultural legitimacy. Roger Ebert
doesn’t think video games can be art because he doesn’t believe an author can
connect with an audience on the same emotional and intellectual level as that
same author could by means of novels, theater, or film (“Video games” 2010). No
matter people’s personal opinions, our culture agrees with Ebert. We see this
based on simple reactions to video games today. Parents the world over lament
the amount of time their kids spend playing video games, yet those same parents
would praise a child for reading books for the same amount of time, in neither
case paying much attention to the quality of the pieces their children engage
with, only the medium. Additionally, if those same children read Shakespeare
for the same hours they played video games, their parents would tout it to the
whole world, lauding their children’s intelligence and maturity. What many
don’t know and others too easily forget, though, is that young people attending
English plays in Shakespeare’s own day were considered worse off than our gamers
of today. Gosson wrote that “the common people which resorte to Theatres [were]
but an assemblie of Tailors, Tinkers, Cordwayners, Saylers, olde Men, yong Men,
Women, Boyes, Girles, and such like” and felt that, in Andrew Gurr’s words,
people “needed protection from corrupting experiences like playgoing” (Gurr
145). What everyone regards now as beautiful and cultural was then ugly trash.
The people that made up Shakespeare’s earliest audiences were, effectively, the
35-year-old parental basement gamers of their day.
Shakespeare fought for his medium’s legitimacy and
won, but not on his own nor even in his own lifetime. Going to a Shakespeare
play now lends to the audience a sense of culture, intellect, and worth—but it
once meant all the opposite. Thanks not just to the extreme popularity of
Shakespeare’s play (though that certainly helped), but also to the
proliferation of printed versions of the plays and other written works, a culture
of criticism and intellectual review rose around English drama that ultimately legitimized
the medium. As the culture rose up around Shakespeare, his plays rose up as
“art” as well, even though the texts themselves remained essentially the same.
Shakespeare’s works were always “art,” but they weren’t always viewed that way,
and the sense of cultural legitimacy that they won is what we really refer to
when we say now that Shakespeare is great art. The fight for video games as art,
then, isn’t really about whether or not the medium fits the definition of art, but whether or not sitting and
playing a video game is viewed as a dangerous waste of time or a legitimate
cultural experience.
Shakespeare found a powerful
weapon to legitimize his theater in looking backward—in harkening back to
classical tragedy, medieval history, and other stories already deemed
culturally important. When Shakespeare proved that theatre could tackle
politics, religion, revenge, love, and all the themes so important to the stories
and mediums of the past, the argument for English drama was all but won. Video
games could take a page from Shakespeare’s book here, as it were, and in some
ways already have. In 2010, EA Games released a video game adaptation of The Divine Comedy entitled Dante’s Inferno. This marked the first
major attempt to adapt great literature to video games—others had been done,
but none funded as well or marketed as widely as this. The game’s reception was
lukewarm, however, from both the literary and the gamer ends, due largely to
the conflict between making a game that would sell to the current market and
making a game that could do justice to Dante’s masterpiece. Games have taken
several strides to release themselves from the need for non-stop slashing and
bashing that doomed Dante’s Inferno,
however, and the next attempt to adapt great literature to a game will benefit
from the strides the game did make—if nothing else, the precedent of game
adaptations.
Jonathan Knight, the executive
producer of Dante’s Inferno, said in
an interview when asked about how Shakespeare would react to the gaming
industry, “Shakespeare would have been on the forefront. He was an innovator
and not just a great story-teller. Arguably, he’s more of a medium innovator”
(Brophy-Warren 2010). Knight makes a valid point here. All scholars (and most
students) realize that Shakespeare wrote very few original plots (The Tempest excepted, perhaps) and
mostly just converted stories from other mediums to the stage, or even from
other stage productions to his own. Knight specifically sites Hamlet, but King Lear, Romeo and Juliet,
Othello, and several others also have
very clear source material—not to mention all of the history plays.
Shakespeare’s genius was not in plot, but style and innovation. Shakespeare’s plays, if we
care to saw it this way, were the Citizen
Kane of English drama, proving what could be done with the medium and
cementing their place in cultural history as great art. Therefore, if we
take his track record as any pattern, it is not difficult to believe that
Shakespeare would indeed be innovating with the newest medium of our own day
that is commonly seen as base and crass—specifically, video games.
Apart
from his pattern of innovation, the very themes he dealt with lend themselves
to video games better than other mediums. Most of Shakespeare’s plots—and
certainly his most famous plots—center around a single, strong character’s
crucial decisions in crucial moments. King Lear’s reaction to his daughters,
Hamlet’s reaction to his father’s ghost, Othello’s reaction to Iago’s words,
Romeo’s reaction to Juliet’s beauty—the plots of every play hinge on these important
choices, and all their choices lead to the ultimate tragedy of each. The Tempest’s Propsero takes this
principle even further as he has more power than perhaps any other Shakespeare
character thanks to his magical powers and his control of the spirit Ariel.
Prospero essentially crafts his own entire plot through his magic, leading his
family and friends through the island in a veritable maze, guiding them step by
step to their final decisions and his own eventual relinquishment of power. The
art and emotion of Shakespeare’s stories comes from the audience identifying
with these central characters and wrestling in their own heart with the choices
these characters face—then, ultimately, coming to understand and sympathize
with the character’s decision despite the tragedy it caused. Video games are
better equipped than any other medium to take on this theme of choice and
consequence because they can literally put that choice in the hands of the audience
like no other medium can.
Consider,
for instance, the ways the following aspects of The
Tempest could be powerfully recast in a video game version of the play:
First, Caliban and Prospero’s
relationship. "All the charms / Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on
you!” Caliban curses on Prospero, “For I am all the subjects that you have, /
Which first was mine own king: and here you sty me / In this hard rock, whiles
you do keep from me / The rest o' the island” (1.2.406-411). Prospero gained his
power after reaching the island—we're not sure how long it took him. However,
at some point he had to decide to enslave Caliban and the spirits of the
island. Many have connected Caliban with natives that Europeans enslaved upon
reaching the New World, bringing up themes of power, abuse, and slavery. An
RPG/Adventure game of The Tempest
could extend this theme interestingly with game mechanics. The game could be
designed as such that the player knows he/she can enslave Caliban, but may not
want to morally and so consider that maybe they could get by without him.
However, inevitably, the player could be forced to realize that he/she has to
enslave Caliban to carry on. This in turn brings a new interpretation to the
play itself and the character of Prospero. Prospero has often been interpreted
as angry and domineering, but as players play the game version set up like
this, it could open a new interpretation of a Prospero turning to his powers to
survive as he tries to rebuild his life after exile. Alternatively, players
could decide that Prospero is angry
and domineering, and enslave Caliban as soon as they learn how to from Prospero’s
books. Thus, interpretations of the play itself could become part of the game,
and players would naturally reflect on the implications of these decisions
without having to be prompted to by a teacher.
Second, the Trinculo and
Stephano subplot. Following in the tradition of interactive productions of
Shakespeare such as Punchdrunk’s Sleep No
More, and even first-person video games like Bioshock, this subplot could be hidden within the game world, never
forced upon the player, but rather something to be sought out and discovered. As
Ken Levine, creative director for the Bioshock
series said, “When people find stuff, they feel like it’s theirs” (NPR). Letting
the player find this subplot while navigating through the island in pursuit of
the main movement of the narrative would naturally open up more interest in
these characters, and could realize the same power this subplot was meant to
have on the stage—comedic relief and absurdity, but also plot depth and range
of perspective. These subplot moments could even introduce absurd mini-games (“Untangle
Trinculo and Caliban!” for example) to draw out the comedic elements in a way
that might be missed by an inexperienced reader trudging through the text of
the play.
Third, Prospero’s final speech
and the theme of vision v. reality. Some moments of The Tempest seem more relevant to a gamer community than any other
group of people in human history. Prospero’s speech in act 4, for instance,
seems almost directed at gamers: “And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
/ The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, / The solemn temples, the
great globe itself, / Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve / And, like this
insubstantial pageant faded, / Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff / As
dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep” (4.1.168-175).
This comes in direct response to Ferdinand’s wish: “Let me live here ever. / So
rare a wondered father and a wise / Makes this place paradise,” a wish surely
shared by many a gamer toward their own game worlds (4.1.137-139). A player
controlling Prospero and choosing to
stop the visions before hearing Prospero give those words would naturally
ponder deeper on their meaning, especially if the “visions” were done with the
powerful and beautiful aesthetics modern games are capable of.
This theme could reach a level
deeper than even any stage production ever has at the end of the game, after
Prospero’s final speech. “Now my charms are all o'erthrown,” Prospero tells the
audience, “And what strength I have's mine own, / Which is most faint: now,
'tis true, / I must be here confined by you, / Or sent to Naples. Let me not, /
Since I have my dukedom got / And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell / In this bare
island by your spell; / But release me from my bands / With the help of your
good hands.” (Epilogue.1-10). Having played the game as Prospero in first
person, the end of the game could suddenly shift to third-person for the player,
and Prospero could speak directly at the player. The game could be programmed
as such that the only way to progress to the game’s close and “win” is to
answer Prospero’s request and “release” him by turning off the game controller.
After some time of great confusion and even frustration before discovering this,
the moment would surely stick in the player’s mind long after turning of the TV
and leaving the game. The same point Shakespeare made with these lines about
the difference between fantasy and reality and the need for both, and especially
the need to understand the limits of both would be made in a powerful,
emotionally charged way that requires the player to physically and literally
fulfill Prospero’s request. Such an ending would have players otherwise
unfamiliar with Shakespeare understanding and talking about The Tempest like no other medium of
production could ever achieve.
Video games may not have their “Shakespeare”
yet, but with how the industry has grown and the strides it has taken—with the
possibilities that are now open to the medium and the innovations that have already
been made to achieve those possibilities—such a powerful, legitimizing influence
cannot be far off. Video games can and will win their cultural legitimacy, and
in the not-too-distant future, children and adults alike will sit down to play
a video game not just for entertainment, but for some of the most powerful and
emotional cultural experiences of their lives—experiences that will uplift,
enlighten, and provoke thought along with the very best art humanity has ever
produced.
Works Cited:
G.B. Harrison, England in Shakespeare's Day. The Folcroft Press, Inc. Folcroft, PA. 1969.
Brown, Ivor. Shakespeare in His Time. Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd. Edinburgh. 1960.
Gurr, Andrew. Playgoing in Shakespeare's London. 3rd ed. Cambridge University Press. 2004.
"Shakespeare's Theater." The Tempest. Folger Shakespeare Library. 2009.
NPR Interview with Ken Levine, April 2, 2013
Ebert, Roger. "Okay, kids, play on my lawn." 1 July 2010. Web.
__________. "Video Games can never be art." 16 April 2010. Web.
Kotaku.com, "The New Tomb Rader Saved This Teenager's Life"
John D. Sutter, "Supreme Court Sees Video Games as Art"
Jamin Brophy-Warren "Dante’s Inferno: Do Classic Poems Make Great Videogames?"
Games TM Review of Bioshock Inifinite
Matt Miller, review of Journey
Adam Sessler, Bioshock Infinite Review,
Sullentrop, Chris, "Video Game Art of Fumito Ueda"
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