‘Fallout 76’ players hosted a live reading of Shakespearean sonnets

A group of Fallout 76 players held a Shakespearean sonnet festival live on Twitch, pulling from a variety of the playwright’s works.

Over the weekend, Fallout 76 content creation group hosted a sonnet festival involving the works of William Shakespeare. The festival featured readings of 14 of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets, some readings being performed live from the PS4 version of the game, others having been recorded in advance on Xbox and PC. The pre-recorded performances were handed out as holotapes for the audience to play on their pipboys.

“While Shakespeare may not have wrote about our present condition, living in the wasteland of a nuclear apocalypse,” said the host Northern Harvest in their opening of the festival. “Fighting everyday for survival with threats of human and nature kind, it is these sonnets that we capture a glimpse of our humanity.”

Northern Harvest started off with a reading of Sonnet 129, ‘Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame’. They explained that it is a sonnet that “reflects the danger of lust. But here in the wasteland, we are plagued by another deadly sin: bloodlust. It’s a violence that ends our humanity, a trap that ensnares us in our struggle over each other’s survival.”

Speaking to PCGamesN, Northern Harvest said of the Fallout 76 sonnet festival “The event felt just like a university English department’s poetry night, if you’ve ever been to one. I feel this is such a unique way for players in an MMO to express themselves, especially since many of us are unable to gather at real-life events due to the pandemic.”

In other news, Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard is concerning some indie developers. Director at Kitfox Games, Tanya Short – developer of Boyfriend Dungeon – said “This Activision acquisition strikes fear in us because it makes it so much more obvious – maybe they could dominate the rest of the year and then what do we do?”