Star Trek Online
Star Trek Online is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) developed by Cryptic Studios and released on February 2, 2010. Players create a Federation or Klingon captain and then play as their starship, controlling the engineering, tactical, and science systems, as well as the crew. The game is set in the 25th century, 30 years after the events of Star Trek: Nemesis, when the peace treaty between the United Federation of Planets and the Klingon Empire has broken down, Romulus and Remus have been destroyed, and the Borg Collective has re-emerged as a major threat.
Connection to Hamlet:
One of the game's assignments involves a holodeck* performance of Hamlet. For the first critical success, the game awards either the William Shakespeare or Wil'yum Shek'sper special duty officer, depending on the player's faction. After the first critical success, subsequent criticals reward a random Photonic duty officer: First Player, Second Player, Third Player, Fourth Player, Voltemand, Cornelius, Osric, Reynaldo, Fortinbras, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Horatio, Ghost of Hamlet's Father, Laertes, Ophelia, Polonius, Gertrude, Claudius, or Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.
Connection to Hamlet:
One of the game's assignments involves a holodeck* performance of Hamlet. For the first critical success, the game awards either the William Shakespeare or Wil'yum Shek'sper special duty officer, depending on the player's faction. After the first critical success, subsequent criticals reward a random Photonic duty officer: First Player, Second Player, Third Player, Fourth Player, Voltemand, Cornelius, Osric, Reynaldo, Fortinbras, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Horatio, Ghost of Hamlet's Father, Laertes, Ophelia, Polonius, Gertrude, Claudius, or Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.
*If you are wondering what a holodeck is, I find the following passage from Jane H. Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace to be a sufficient description:
First introduced on Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1987, the holodeck consists of an empty black cube covered in white gridlines upon which a computer can project elaborate simulations by combining holography with manetic "force fields" and energy-to-matter conversions. The result is an illusory world that can be stopped, started, or turned off at will but that looks and behaves like the actual world and includes parlor fires, drinkable tea, and characters...who can be touched, conversed with, and even kissed. The Star Trek holodeck is a universal fantasy machine, open to individual programming: a vision of the computer as a kind of storytelling genie lamp. In the three series in which the holodeck has been featured, crew members have entered richly detailed worlds...in order to participate in stories that change around them in response to their actions. (Murray, 15)
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