XplanaZine

LOVE, MADNESS, AND SHAKESPEARE:
Embedded journalist and video game-inspired collaborative strategies.
By Susan Smith Nash.
Done well, Shakespeare can be a heart-pounding limit experience where you find out about yourself and the psychology of larger-than-life characters. It’s emotionally intimate. The thrill is so intense it almost feels “wrong” - toying with the taboo, exposure, violence, longing, death.
Why doesn’t someone make a video game of this stuff??
Why not, indeed?
Imagine in Romeo and Juliet, being able to role-play the various characters. After watching clips from Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet to get an idea about how one director envisioned updating the classic play, one can get an idea of how to make the experience intense, immediate, and personal for the student.
One can ask students to design a video game – or, at least break up the components of the video-gaming experience and create activities for web-based course instruction.
Music. Before Romeo+Juliet, Baz Luhrmann was well-known for directing music videos. The soundtrack for the film takes emotional orchestration to a new level. It is, in many ways, like the various forms of electronic music – trance, chill-out music, etc. – which is purposefully designed to manage moods. Ask a student to create a soundtrack for a scene that they will rewrite, inserting themselves. They can select music clips they’ve downloaded and create a list, or mix a CD. Then they can write themselves into a scene, modifying it to fit their own lives, and the current world. These can be posted and shared.
Personal Mask-Making and Identity Shifting. Part of the intensity of Romeo and Juliet involves exploring the hidden knowledge you encounter when you wear a mask. In a video game, you would need to be able to disguise yourself. Actually, you can disguise not only yourself, but death itself. Think of the sleeping potion that made one mimic death. Think of the scene in the crypt – being the only one alive – life masked as death, and under a house of death, one finds life. Ask students to design masks for the costume party. How would they design them? Ask them to use symbols, visual metaphors, etc. in their masks, then post them on the Internet (or in a folder / blog) for others to see & comment on.
Verona.com – Embedded Journalism in Walled Cities, Plague, Death, and Death’s Antidotes. We enter the madness of civilization in all of Shakespeare’s plays. The dynamics we find in Shakespeare reinvent themselves – ethnic clashes, mafias and rival gangs, plague, quarantine, and the contemplation of death’s antidotes. The sense of danger, creeping paranoia, and a repressive social system are elevated to an intense degree in Romeo and Juliet. Students can become “embedded reporters” in Shakespeare’s world – and in their role as investigative journalists and news editors, they can create their own newspaper based on the play. Ask students to view the onion.com, nytimes.com, and sfgate.com. Then ask students to create their own news website. Ask them to describe how and why they chose their headlines, the graphics, the captions, and the arrangement on the page. You may wish to provide a template, either in Word or in a web-editing program such as Dreamweaver or a free one downloadable from the Internet.
These are just a few ideas to get started. The idea is to make Shakespeare an immersion experience that emphasizes the human emotions that animate the dramas.
Love, madness, and Shakespeare. First the course, now the experience!!