This book is, in part, an effort to recount the genesis and development of a game that we, the authors, collaboratively created: the motion-capture Shakespeare game Play the Knave. But more than documenting the history of a specific digital humanities project, the book treats Play the Knave as an index of larger questions about collaboration and the making of postdisciplinary laboratories—or rather, collaboratories. In the spirit of other studies of humanities laboratories and transformative research that conjoins the humanities, arts, and sciences, we address the affordances of exploratory, lab-based collaboration for the curation of humanistic knowledge and the creation of critical media technologies.[1] To this end, the book is also about the formation of the particular collaboratory that gave rise to Play the Knave, namely, the UC Davis ModLab.
From its inception, the ModLab has encouraged transformative research—modifying the disciplines, modding cultural materials, and opening new modes of inquiry—through media operations and development. It’s a mod, mod world, as we like to say. Our experiences in developing this collaboratory space where scholars and students from the humanities, arts, and sciences could work together on shared projects helped to underscore the ways in which laboratories in general function as engines of knowledge translation and transmutation. More than sites for purifying and isolating natural phenomena for further scrutiny, laboratories are spaces where cultural discourses and social formations become articulated with and through technical objects, materials, tools, and instruments, making new ways of seeing and thinking possible.
While our book follows in the footsteps of other work about the creative features of laboratories and collaboratories, we also take some distinctive twists and turns. In particular, we foreground play as a method and theater—especially Shakespearean theater—as a model for lab-based experimentation. To lay out this argument, our accounting of laboratory practices draws puckishly from the field of science and technology studies (STS) and its conceptual tools, particularly the theory of “actor-networks.”[2] Of course, the very notion of an actor is rooted in theater, associated with fiction and fabulation, pretense and pretension, and a disposition to play different roles at the drop of a hat. In this book, we double down on the theatrical nature of laboratory actors, showing that the laboratory is a stage, a playground—a space of fun and games. We highlight the performative aspects of experimentation, focusing on playful interactions among human as well as nonhuman actors in the making of knowledge. We base our assessments partly on our studies of other labs, and partly on our own experiences as struggling laboratory actors.
In forming the ModLab, for example, we each initially found ourselves embodying and performing distinctive sets of disciplinary standards, expectations, and modes of expertise—each of us representing different traditions of disciplinary knowledge and domains of application, often defined in distinction to other disciplines. But over time, these individuated disciplinary performances became ensemble activities, reshaped through improvisation, interpretation, and translation, mutated into novel and sometimes surprising configurations. Through our work together, roles changed, plots changed, and we changed with them. To ventriloquize Shakespeare, we found ourselves “translated.” In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the mechanical Peter Quince witnesses his fellow aspiring actor Nick Bottom suddenly transmuted into a hybrid man-donkey by the mischievous fairy Puck. Quince exclaims, “Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee! Thou art translated!” But Bottom, thinking his friends are poking fun—they are amateur actors, after all—brushes it off as mere horseplay: “I see their knavery. This is to make an ass of me.”[3] Silliness, indeed. But here’s the point: Bottom’s translation—becoming a hybrid of human stuff and fey magic, a boundary object between worlds—takes place in a scene of play: the fairy forest where he and his friends are rehearsing a skit, punning with abandon, goofing about, and, as it were, playing the knave. In Shakespeare’s themes of experimental tinkering, strange conjoinings, and the profound translations that often take place in scenes of play, we see a mirror of our own laboratory life.[4]
Such themes are baked into Play the Knave, the upstart game at the heart of this book. It is a Shakespeare simulator, a game about theater and theatrical experimentation. Following an open beta-testing cycle that began on February 13, 2015, it was officially released to the public on February 2, 2020. Developed for the Windows operating system, it employs a Microsoft Kinect camera to control the action. (A version of the game redesigned for immersive VR, currently in development, supports the Meta Quest headset and touch controllers.) Players craft their own production of a scene from Shakespeare, choosing costumed actors, music, and theater space. They then perform the scene, karaoke style, using their own bodily gestures and voices to animate their on-screen avatars. The Kinect camera tracks skeletal movement data, mapping it onto a 3D avatar on screen, so that the avatar mirrors each user’s gestures in real time. The gameplay sessions can be recorded if players wish to view their performances afterwards, or create longer productions by splicing scenes together using video editing software. Players can also write or edit their own dramatic scripts to upload into the game, as bards behind the scenes. Play the Knave engages users in the material labor of dramatic production, helping them understand the assemblage of human and nonhuman actors and the material, textual, and performative modalities that make theater meaningful—as well as endlessly reinterpretable.
As a high-tech toy for making theater, Play the Knave is not only the product of an actor-network; it also bodies forth an actor-network on the spot, evident even at the moment of firing up the software and beginning the game. The game requires players to interact with each other, the hardware, the software, and the environment around them in order to produce the performance piece. The game insists on intersubjective collaboration—among players, among machines, among audiences. In other words, Play the Knave becomes an allegory of the laboratory as such. Moreover, as it travels among users, it propagates experimental modes of knowledge-making.
This book was written collaboratively, and in the spirit of collaboration. As such, it not only narrates but also enacts the ensemble work of our whole research team.[5] At the same time, we articulate the roles played by nonhuman actors in the laboratory: the various technical systems with which human researchers grapple as they create media projects. In developing Play the Knave, our research team encountered a range of obstinate technical systems including the Unity game engine, the Windows operating system, the Kinect camera, the various graphics cards and CPUs of a motley assortment of computers, and the evolving code base of our software experiments. These nonhuman actors were no less participants in the experimental drama that was transpiring through the development of our video game and the ModLab’s other interactive media productions. In our work with these technical systems, new capacities, new features, serendipitous discoveries, hacks, workarounds, and innovations all emerged with regularity: the hardware and software entities of the lab changed and mutated over time, as much as the human researchers did. While technical entities typically appear unobtrusively in many laboratories as backdrops, furniture, or props—mere instrumentalities for the pursuit of matters of fact—in our projects they took on more central roles. As characters in the unfolding drama of our game’s development, technical objects often defined our research questions and methods, leading us toward new ways of doing cultural research by experimenting with the capacities of computational media.
Taking the development of Play the Knave as a case study, we reflect on the ways in which multidisciplinary collaboration in laboratories can, over time, generate new epistemic collectives, namely, postdisciplinary collaboratories. We also argue that laboratories—whether natural science laboratories or digital humanities laboratories—are performative, theatrical domains in which modes of play are affirmative practices of experimental knowledge production. Play the Knave, as a game, enacts these ideas. It rhetorically emphasizes the theater as a ludic space, a zone of gaming. At the same time, it shows how ludic space cultivates experimental forms of practice: testing things out in an iterative manner, and learning the properties, the affordances of persons and things in intimate proximity, measure for measure. To further reinforce these points, we show how the works of Shakespeare—constituting the discursive field on which the game draws—serve as touchstones for an enriched understanding of experimental knowledge-making as play. Together with Shakespeare, then, we suggest that play is a way of engaging the processes of co-construction by which actors, human and nonhuman, collaboratively produce a world.
Shakespearean drama also inspires the format of our book, which takes the shape of a classical five-act play. First comes a prologue, then five acts, and lastly an epilogue. We begin in Act I with exposition, providing a history of the ModLab to set the stage for the rising action of Act II, the story of ModLab’s creation of Play the Knave. These first two acts flesh out the social processes of lab-making and game-making, attending to situational matters—institutional, financial, and technological—and the dances of serendipity, contingency, and overdetermination that enable discovery and innovation. The book builds to a climax in Act III, in which we discuss the invention of Mekanimator, the software platform we built for Play the Knave. The dramatic arc continues in Act IV, which looks at the challenges of making innovative software for specific commercial motion-capture cameras (Microsoft Kinect v1 and v2), addressing their technical features and optical capacities, while also considering issues of hardware obsolescence. Bringing the plot threads together, Act V then draws to a resolution, revealing how Play the Knave’s mixed-reality interface reflects and refracts the concerns of a particular Shakespeare drama, The Tempest. Finally, the epilogue closes the show by revisiting the theme of experimentation and recounting how Shakespeare’s Hamlet models a ludic method of research. In the end, the audience is left with a rascally theory of relative knowledge that answers the age-old question of what it means to play the knave.
Thus, in both form and content—and all in good fun—the book traces the theatrical dimensions of collaborative research and the promiscuous conjoinings of the postdisciplinary lab. Indeed, the book melds the disciplinary expertise of its authors, who write in a unified voice. That said, we recognize that most of our readers will come to the book with particular disciplinary backgrounds and may gravitate toward parts that align most closely with their areas of expertise—though we hope to inspire our readers to dip or dive into other parts that may move beyond their comfort zones. In this book, we strive to analyze software systems in enough detail to be interesting for purely technical reasons. But at the same time, even in the more technical sections, we develop humanistic analyses of those systems that elucidate the technical details from different angles. No special expertise is required to engage productively with any part of this book.
The book’s open-access, online format likewise aims to facilitate cross-disciplinary, experimental reading practices. For us, the book’s format is yet another way we invite participation in our collaboratory. One of the characteristics of digital humanities projects—and what distinguishes them from most other scholarly output in the humanities—is their open-endedness. In part because they depend for their design and distribution on hardware and software that may change rapidly—sometimes opening up new project elements, sometimes rendering other project elements obsolete—digital humanities projects can seem to be perennially “in process.” In addition, as we have keenly observed with Play the Knave, digital humanities projects require the input of their users, whose roles are less those of consumers than playmates, companions in a participatory theatrical experience. As you make your way through this multimedia and multimodal book, we hope you enjoy its features—words, images, videos, interactive functions, kinesthetic engagements. We encourage you to explore and participate. While this book presents scholarly ideas about experimental play, it also offers practical resources—such as lesson plans and software tools—with which readers may experiment in their own collaboratories. We invite you to tinker with these things and to collaborate with us in futures yet unknown. All the world’s a stage—so let’s all play.
On scientific boundary objects as translations between different social worlds, see Star and Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects.” On ways in which A Midsummer Night’s Dream prefigures themes of the modern experimental sciences, especially the fields of biotechnology, see Turner, Shakespeare’s Double Helix. On scenes of play and silly wordplay in Shakespeare as spotlighting epistemic questions about mechanical tinkering, conjoining, translation, and empirical evidence, see Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins.
On scientific boundary objects as translations between different social worlds, see Star and Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects.” On ways in which A Midsummer Night’s Dream prefigures themes of the modern experimental sciences, especially the fields of biotechnology, see Turner, Shakespeare’s Double Helix. On scenes of play and silly wordplay in Shakespeare as spotlighting epistemic questions about mechanical tinkering, conjoining, translation, and empirical evidence, see Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins.
For examples, see Drucker, SpecLab; Balsamo, Designing Culture; Hayles, How We Think; King, Networked Reenactments; S. Jones, The Emergence of the Digital Humanities; Klein, Interdisciplining Digital Humanities; O’Gorman, Necromedia; Lane, The Big Humanities; Svensson, Big Digital Humanities; Deegan and McCarty, eds., Collaborative Research in the Digital Humanities; Davidson and Savonick, “Digital Humanities”; McPherson, Feminist in a Software Lab; Malazita, Teboul, and Rafeh, “Digital Humanities as Epistemic Cultures”; Wershler, Emerson, and Parikka, The Lab Book; and Zurr and Catts, Tissues, Cultures, Art.
Among the many contributors to the project’s development, we especially wish to highlight Evan Buswell, who was part of the core development team and a critical architect of the software, but was unable to participate in the writing of this book. For a full list of contributors to the project, see “Credits,” PlaytheKnave.org, 2020, https://www.playtheknave.org/credits.html.
Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 3.1.120–23. Unless otherwise noted, all citations of Shakespeare’s plays are taken from the Folger Shakespeare online editions; see “The Folger Shakespeare: All Shakespeare’s Works,” Folger Shakespeare Library, 2023, https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/all-works/.
For examples, see Drucker, SpecLab; Balsamo, Designing Culture; Hayles, How We Think; King, Networked Reenactments; Jones, The Emergence of the Digital Humanities; Klein, Interdisciplining Digital Humanities; O’Gorman, Necromedia; Lane, The Big Humanities; Svensson, Big Digital Humanities; Deegan and McCarty, eds., Collaborative Research in the Digital Humanities; Davidson and Savonick, “Digital Humanities”; McPherson, Feminist in a Software Lab; Wershler, Emerson, and Parikka, The Lab Book; and Zurr and Catts, Tissues, Cultures, Art.