Last month I attended the annual conference for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) at the Planet Hollywood casino in Las Vegas. In keeping with the geographic backdrop, a series of “Spectacular” plenaries took place as part of the conference. As part of the “Spectacular Technology” plenary panel, I presented on the Macbeth video game I built earlier this year, Something Wicked. Past descriptions of my work are here; in short, I integrate a broad directorial approach with textual analysis in Something Wicked, which enacts the Norwegian invasion described in Act 1, Scene 2 of Macbeth, thereby forcing players to respond to key constraints in the source play.
My fellow panelists were Jeremy Reynolds from Louisiana Tech University, who presented “Spectacular Electricity: Visuality, Technology and Electricity on the Victorian Stage,” and Doug Reside, from the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, who presented “Chromolume #8: Recreating Historical Lighting Designs in Computer Gaming Platforms.” Of the many inspiring takeaways from this panel, I found one of the more exciting to be the range of perspectives it validated. I hope the variety of practice-led and theoretical engagements of the relationship of theatre studies and digital culture our panel offered can continue in our field’s future gatherings.