Although Shakespeare and his plays have been a frequent subject of videogame adaptations in the past, these have often been confined to either theatre-making games (which present the staging of Shakespeare plays using the mechanisms of strategy or simulation videogame genres) of education/trivia games that aim to familiarise players with Shakespeare’s texts. While references to Shakespeare abound in videogames, there have been relatively few attempts to directly adapt one of his plays into the form of an interactive videogame narrative, where the player controls one or more of the principal characters and can affect the outcome of the story. This paper will examine four videogame adaptations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, whose differing approaches to player-agency and interactivity in relation to narrative of the classic play demonstrate the interactive potential of Shakespearean drama. While the player-driven overwriting or rewriting of the classic text may appear irreverent, it is, in each game, dependent on some conception the original play and the past tradition that it represents, which is translated into the contemporary medium of the videogame. This illustrates Jacques Derrida’s contention that the longevity and translatability of Shakespearean texts are due to their ‘spectral’ qualities, in that they allow the past to be re-examined through the lens of the present and vice versa.

中文翻译：

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“时间不合时宜”：《哈姆雷特》电视游戏改编中的互动性和玩家代理

尽管在过去，莎士比亚及其戏剧一直是电子游戏改编的主题，但这些活动通常仅限于教育/琐事的剧场游戏（使用策略或模拟电子游戏类型的机制呈现莎士比亚戏剧的演出）旨在使玩家熟悉莎士比亚文字的游戏。虽然在电子游戏中经常提到莎士比亚，但很少有人尝试直接将他的剧作改编成交互式电子游戏叙事的形式，在这种叙事中，玩家控制一个或多个主要角色并可能影响故事的结局。本文将研究莎士比亚的《哈姆雷特》的四种电子游戏改编版，他在经典剧本叙事方面与球员代理和互动的不同方法展现了莎士比亚戏剧的互动潜力。尽管玩家驱动的经典文本的覆盖或重写可能看起来很繁琐，但在每种游戏中，它取决于某种概念，即原始游戏和它所代表的过去传统，这被转化为电子游戏的当代媒介。这说明了雅克·德里达（Jacques Derrida）的论点，即莎士比亚文本的长寿和可译性源于其“谱”质，因为它们使过去可以从现在的角度重新审视，反之亦然。