Rich connections between gaming and theater stretch back to the 16th and 17th centuries, when England's first commercial theaters appeared right next door to gaming houses and blood-sport arenas. In the first book-length exploration of gaming in the early modern period, Gina Bloom shows that theaters succeeded in London's new entertainment marketplace largely because watching a play and playing a game were similar experiences. Audiences did not just see a play; they were encouraged to play the play, and knowledge of gaming helped them become better theatergoers. Examining dramas written for these theaters alongside evidence of analog games popular then and today, Bloom argues for games as theatrical media and theater as an interactive gaming technology.

Gaming the Stage also introduces a new archive for game studies: scenes of onstage gaming, which appear at climactic moments in dramatic literature. Bloom reveals plays to be systems of information for theater spectators: games of withholding, divulging, speculating, and wagering on knowledge. Her book breaks new ground through examinations of plays such as The Tempest, Arden of Faversham, A Woman Killed with Kindness, and A Game at Chess; the histories of familiar games such as cards, backgammon, and chess; less familiar ones, like Game of the Goose; and even a mixed-reality theater videogame.

Gina Bloom is Professor of English, University of California, Davis.

It is a tour de force, the kind of book that could be written only by someone with comprehensive knowledge of their period, an acute sensitivity to the embodied experience of theatre and gaming, a firm critical-theoretical hand, and practical grounding in the design of playful theatrical experiences.

— Theatre Journal

...Gaming the Stage convincingly presents its case for the strategically participatory structure of early modern theatre. The author's passion to correct gaps in current game studies scholarship is evident throughout, and the monograph deserves a wide readership.

— Theatre Survey

By intersecting interactivity with game play and theatrical experience, Bloom is able to examine indeed, play with the evidence offered by early modern stage plays to create new and fresh methodologies that game scholars, theatre scholars, and historians would all do well to learn from. Bloom fluently brings together a number of concepts, threads, and ideas that help to construct the foundation upon which Gaming the Stage presents its compelling readings, opening up game studies and early modern literary and dramatic history to conceptualize anew an approach that accounts for embodied experience as much as textual record.

— Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England

— MRDS David Bevington Prize

— TLA George Freedley Memorial Award

— ATHE Outstanding Book Award