I have to admit I was skeptical when I read the
article in CTV.ca about 'Speare. From the article, "Makers of a new
video game are hoping students will become excited about Shakespeare
by trading in their books for a spaceship." *yawn* Let me guess:
you have to fly to different Shakespeare-themed planets and answer a
series of multiple choice trivia questions, right? Well, yes, and
no. There is trivia, but I was pleasantly surprised to discover that
most of the game is actually a top down, scrolling shooter (think
Ikaruga) that does involve some fact-memorization but
mainly consists of fighting off waves of Insidians, powered by poetry. The game, designed
by University of Guelph English professor Dan Fischlin and developed by Apollo
Games, is being marketed to schools, but you can download a nice demo
from the developers website.
The plot centers on a society based on knowledge and poetry (which
sounds pretty good to me), and the two warring planets Capulon and
Montagor (in the fair Verona System, where I guess we lay our
scene). These factions have to work together to save the the Knowledge
Spheres (artifacts of Poetic Code) which have been stolen by the
invading Insidian Army.
This is the Galaxy you must save.
Gameplay consists mainly of shooting enemies and avoiding their
bullets, but you earn points, energy, and abilities by either
examining artifacts or collected text fragments. The "examine" feature
is a pretty cool mechanic whereby you can freeze the action and
examine each element on the playing field. Specially identified
artifact items contai short tidbits of Shakespearean information
that help you in the quiz that will conclude each level (I told you
there was trivia). The other linguistic mechanic involves collecting
knowledge fragments that fall from defeated Insidions that have some
relationship to a key Shakespearean phrase given to you in a briefing
at the outset of the mission. For example, the first level I played
used the phrase, "I Bite My Thumb at Them." Throughout the mission,
capsules dropped by Insidions reveal a word which rotates if you shoot
the capsule. If you collect the capsule when it displays a word from
your phrase or a word that bears a sanctioned relationship to one of
your words (in my case, synonyms and homonyms were acceptable), you
gain points. If you collect a capsule with an unrelated word or a word
you've already collected, you lose points or your ship is subjected to
temporary paralysis.
Gameplay is relatively fast-paced and involves recognizing synonyms and homonyms.
The introduction explains that in a society based on the power of
Poetic Codes, "The power to speak is the power to do." I think that's
a rather nice idea that maps relatively well onto the game play
action, even though the player-character doesn't actually exercise
power through speech. It's clear that the game doesn't
replace actually reading the plays (or better still,
performing them), but I'll bet it does a decent job augmenting more
traditional Shakespeare curricula. In the end, most of
'Speare appeal and marketing will be along the lines that
it Makes Learning Fun, and certainly it relies somewhat on a gimmick
factor, the classic bait and switch logic of edutainment. Still, it's
nice to see a learning-oriented game that's a real arcade-style
shooter with decent production values.
As a sidenote, I did some googling when I heard about this because I
thought the idea of a Shakespeare themed game sounded familiar. I came
across this
article about the Royal Shakespeare Company producing a game in
conjunction with MIT, and I remember hearing Ted Castranova being
interviewed on NPR mention a Shakespeare-themed
MMORPG. Both of those stories are kind of old though, so does
anyone know if there have been any updates on either of these, or are
these perhaps the same project?
As another sidenote, the downloadable version of the demo runs on the
alpha version of Apollo, the multi-OS RIA from Adobe, which seems
pretty cool. As far as I can tell, it's kind of like a standalone
shockwave player with builtin API for interfacing with the local
computer. The website for 'Speare claims that this is the
first downloadable game for the Apollo platform, and it does work
pretty well once you get it installed. I'm not sure if "Apollo Games"
has any relationship to the Adobe software, incidentally, but this
looks like a promising environment for developing games.
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