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In an era in which games increasingly mediate students’ encounters with reality, Shakespeare instructors are turning to games to foster active, agential engagement with Shakespeare’s plays. A survey of Shakespeare’s interaction with games in pedagogical contexts, including “gamified Shakespeare classrooms” and “game-infused Shakespeare curricula,” suggests that despite the optimism surrounding games as tools for emancipatory Shakespeare learning — defined here as an education that reduces student dependency on the instructor and empowers students to explore Shakespeare on their own terms — such practices have not yet been critically examined for their limitations. I argue that this limitation stems from a tendency to prioritize questions of game design and gameful curriculum design over the more fundamental question of why games and gamification are needed to teach Shakespeare in the first place. Before designing games or gameful curricula for Shakespeare classrooms, scholars must therefore consider how video games facilitate emancipatory learning differently from traditional pedagogical methods. Recognizing well-designed Shakespeare video games as authentic Shakespearean adaptations capable of generating new forms of meaning-making offers one possible step in this direction.
emancipatory education, video games, gamification, Shakespeare user