Gameology 2.0

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.