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A videogame adaptation of Hamlet has been turned back into a stage show

To be, or not to be—that is a rhetorical question, and it gets at the challenges facing anyone who wishes to convert Shakespeare’s Hamlet into a videogame. Games are about the ways user choices can shape a narrative and Hamlet—well, let’s just say he prefers to keep his own counsel.  Every level must be conquered until Hamlet’s father’s death has been avenged!  Nevertheless, Simon Peacock, the Voice and Motion Capture Director of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, recently took on the challenge of converting Hamlet into a videogame, and then converting that game back into a play. This is more than a theatrical game…

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Arm wrestle burly fish in this adaptation of Hemingway’s philosophy of manhood

If you’ve never read Ernest Hemingway’s 1952 novel The Old Man and the Sea there is now an abridged version in which you arm wrestle a marlin. It’s a videogame with the superb title of The Old Man Club, which not only refers back to the novel’s title, but may also allude to a critique of those who have interpreted Hemingway’s writing as expressing a supreme form of manliness. embody everything that is considered to be traditionally masculine  In The Old Man and the Sea, the masculine reading is found by those who seek it in the struggle of an…

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Videogame based on Moby Dick lets you wreak havoc as the white whale

Header image: Poster for 1976 theatrical re-release of Moby Dick. ///  After Captain Ahab’s whaling ship, the Pequod, has been destroyed by the white whale he’s been hunting across the globe in the final scenes of Herman Melville’s classic novel Moby Dick, he says the following: “Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.” It’s clear that Ahab has come to hate the whale with an unmeasured scorn. It took one of his legs prior…