Playing Beowulf 1: Ludic Rhapsodies

Abstract

I've chosen Chapter 7 as a sample because it gives something of an overview of projects run by myself and colleagues in young people's game designs based, in this case, on Beowulf. It draws heavily on my colleagues' published work, while also offering an in-depth analysis of one game made by a 10 year-old boy in the workshop we ran at the National Videogame Arcade in Nottingham. The chapter refers back to some of the arguments I've made in previous chapters about the playful disposition of literature in general, the cellular nature of game narrative in particular, the multimodal qualities of videogames, and the kinds of literacies that game play and game design involve. It anticipates further chapters which go on to explore videogame transformations of Beowulf by graduate students of Anglo-Saxon, and game designs of Macbeth by secondary students in Cambridge, Yorkshire and London. I hope readers may find this sample a sufficiently interesting taster to lead them to the whole book, which represents at least ten years of applied and theoretical research, as well as a hinterland of experience in classrooms, which honed my sense of the literature game and what young people make of it

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