SUPERSTITION SURROUNDING THE PLAY

As success or failure in the theater can be influenced by so many intangible and unpredictable factors, it’s not surprising that actors and other theater types maintain a variety of long-standing superstitions, which often are taken very seriously. (The most famous is the insistence on saying “break a leg” rather than “good luck.”)

 

Two such superstitions float around Macbeth. The first is that it’s bad luck to even say “Macbeth” except during rehearsal or performance. When referring to the work one instead uses circumlocutions, such as “the Scottish play” or “Mackers” or “the Scottish business” or “the Glamis comedy” or just “that play.” Some say this rule applies only when inside a theater; it’s OK, therefore, to use the dread name in other settings – like classrooms, for instance.

 

The remedy, if someone does happen to utter the unutterable, is to leave the room, close the door, turn around three times, say a dirty word (or spit, some say), then knock on the door and ask to be let back in. If you can’t do all that, you simply quote from Hamlet, act 1, scene 4: “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!”

 

The second superstition is that the play itself brings ill luck to cast and crew, and many productions of Macbeth have, in fact, encountered unfortunate circumstances. The supposed origin story for this is that Shakespeare used “authentic” witches’ chants in the play; as punishment, real witches cast a curse on the play, condemning it for all time.

 

If legends are to be believed, bad fortune for productions of Macbeth seems to have started fairly early on: one story (which I have not been able to verify), is that King James I banned the play for about five years after he first saw it, in 1606. Some say he found the witches’ curses too realistic – having authored a work on demonology, he considered himself an expert.

 

Among the incidents cited as examples of the curse at work (and we don’t guarantee the veracity of some of the earlier stories):

 

• In the first production of Macbeth, on August 7, 1606, Hal Berridge, the boy playing Lady Macbeth, became feverish and died backstage. This story is likely mythical, and further tradition says that Shakespeare had to take over the part. (One version holds that Shakespeare played the role badly, and later chewed out his fellow actors for mentioning “that play,” thus beginning the tradition of not referring to it by name.)

 

• In a 1672 production in Amsterdam, the actor playing Macbeth substituted a real dagger for the blunted stage dagger and killed the actor playing Duncan, in full view of the audience.

024 – BTWMC test 2.0

Today we are going to re-sit the BTWMC test. You are required to achieve a score of at least 34/42.

 

 

023 – Grammar, handwriting and new words for spelling test

Your words for the next spelling test are listed below. You are required to learn the spelling and definition of each word.

abandon

abroad

absence

absolute

academic

acceptable

access

accident

accommodation

accompany

accurate

accusation

acid

acknowledge

acquire

acquisition

acre

activism

actor

actress

The complete list of all words that we are going to learn this year can be found by clicking on this link.

022 – Edit blog, start new post and collect in hmk

Today we are looking ahead to the open night that is coming up on May 2nd. This class I would like you to focus on two things:

  1. Re-read and correct one of the blog posts that you have already done
  2. Choose another one of the blogs from the list created and do another
Tomorrow’s class will involve a homework and research project focus.

 

023 – Debating

Today is all about competing in your debates. Remember that you are being assessed on how we you speak, regardless of which side you argue for, so make sure you are confident and stay within the two minute time limit.

022 – Final preparation for tomorrow’s debate

Today you must finish preparing for tomorrow’s debate. Please make sure that you know:

  1. What the three main arguments are for your team and which one you will be presenting
  2. What the opposition arguments are and how you may rebut them
  3. What your first sentence is going to be and what key things you must mention

You should take the opportunity to rehearse your section with your group; listen to your team mates and offer constructive criticism.

 

021 – Debating preparation and assessment rubric

Today we are going to finish preparing for our debates. Below is the marking scheme that will be used.

MATTER MANNER METHOD
INADEQUATE 28 28 12
SATISFACTORY 29 29 13
GOOD 30 30 14
VERY GOOD 31 31 15
EXCELLENT 32 32 16-17

 

MATTER (40)

Content of what the team says; both prepared material and rebuttal

 

MANNER (40)

How you say it. This focuses on delivery skills (voice, pace, stance)

 

METHOD (40)

The way each individual, and the team as a whole, put together the argument to create a coherent whole

Videogames, aggression, Anders Breivik – let’s not join the dots

“Violent videogames cause people to become violent in real life”. It’s a familiar refrain for anyone who has read a newspaper in the last 15 years.

Today, the media reporting surrounding the trial of accused mass-murderer Anders Breivik has dusted off this old chestnut to explain a shooting spree and bomb attack that claimedthe lives of 77 people in Oslo last year.

Breivik has testified that he used World of Warcraft and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare to train for his attacks. He also testified to be a member of the anti-Muslim militant group Knights Templar and refused to recognise the authority of the federal court system.

The fact that videogames play no demonstrable part in Breivik’s (or any other) act of violence hasn’t stopped the media from creating and re-creating this narrative, even to the point that university media officers are picking up the chant.

The research shows what?

A University of Gothenburg press release about a new study is entitled Researchers questioning link between violent computer games and aggressiveness.

The release reports that the authors are “questioning the whole gaming and violence debate”. The study itself, published in the International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning is entitled How gamers manage aggression: Situating skills in collaborative computer games.

Taken together, these two titles might lead one to interpret the study in a similar vein to researchers Craig Anderson orChristopher Ferguson. That is, it would make sense to argue either that violent videogames do (Anderson) or do not (Ferguson) have a meaningful effect on players’ aggression levels in real life.

Instead, the research is actually a detailed study of how players of massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) – such as World of Warcraft – cooperate to manage the attention of powerful, dangerous enemy characters (known as bosses). In MMO parlance, that attention is known as “aggro”.

The aggression being managed, then, is not that of the players, but of the computer-controlled enemies. How, then, is this research linked to the debate about media effects?

Hint: it’s not.

The ‘media effects’ narrative

As Dan Golding pointed out in an earlier article on The Conversation, the media only seem equipped to discuss videogames in three ways:

The press release announcing this new study, as well as coverage of Breivik’s trial by the Sydney Morning Herald, among others, falls right into the first category.

The notion of media effects and transfer (from medium to real-life) is perhaps as old as communications media themselves. Even Plato was wary of the power of the poet “because he awakens and nourishes and strengthens the feelings and impairs the reason”.

Today’s “violence and videogames” narrative is well-worn. So much so that even a public relations officer at a university takes a study on videogames with the word “aggression” in its title to be examining a “link” between mediated depictions of violence and real-world aggression.

But the link to the media effects research such as Anderson and Ferguson’s is not entirely facetious: the Swedish team of researchers are in fact questioning the basis of the videogame violence debate; the “transfer” mentioned earlier.

Transfer, as the study points out, is a contentious construct of educational theory. It is, to quote from the article: “the appearance of a person carrying the product of learning from one task, problem, situation, or institution to another”. In this case, the “transfer” of aggression from videogames to real-life.

The authors of this study rightly point out that the nature of transfer is contentious, ill-defined, and rarely agreed upon. Thus, there are disagreements about how to empirically measure the effects of media on an audience.

But instead of pursuing this, the paper moves on to conduct a close study of raid encounters (where numerous players attempt to take out a boss together), documenting the skills and knowledge used by players who cooperate successfully.

These skills include:

  • spatial awareness and the importance of positioning one’s avatar in the immediate geography around the boss before and during the fight
  • case-specific knowledge about additional enemies entering the fray and appropriate responses
  • reacting to other unexpected events during the fight, such as the death of a healer (a team member who’s role it is to heal fellow players).

The depth and precision of the details presented in this study are valuable and will certainly provide excellent reference material for future scholars who are researching and writing about MMO gameplay. But this study simply isn’t focused on violent videogames leading to aggression in the real world.

Overcoming the narrative

The aim of the study I’ve been discussing was, in fact, to take a step back from the debate entirely and avoid assuming the straightforward transfer of media, with regard to videogames.

The authors “approached collaborative gaming where aggression is represented as a practice to be studied on its own premises”.

To that end, the study is working around what media researcher James Paul Gee calls “the problem of content”. That is, looking past the representations of violence shown on screen and measuring what the human players are actually learning to do while playing the game.

In this case, players deploy very specific knowledge about the geography of terrain, the behaviour of bosses and the various skills their individual avatar possesses.

This study does not suggest that causing an avatar to swing a broadsword will incite the human player to do the same, or similar, the next time he or she steps out of the house for some milk.

Even though there’s no consensus on media effects nor the relationship between videogame and real-world violence, the international press still get completely lost in a frenzy as they pump out hysteria-filled headlines.

Gaming news outlet, Rock, Paper, Shotgun has called out a range of global outlets on their reporting of the Breivik case. Thankfully, publications such as these are interested in clarity and truth and refuse to allow the popular mythology of videogame violence to cloud basic reporting.

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