rachel heleva

What if performing a line of Shakespeare changed the world of the play?

you are rhyme is a voice-activated theatrical game built around the confrontation between Hamlet and Gertrude in Act III, Scene IV. Rather than selecting moves from a conventional menu, players speak their characters' lines. How those lines are delivered shapes what happens on a tactical grid.

The game translates vocal performance into rules. A local speech-recognition pipeline listens for pauses and volume, while the system compares spoken words with Shakespeare's script and measures changes in pacing. Those signals pass through a custom domain-specific language that turns performance into actions such as lunging, feinting, repelling, disarming, and altering the arras.

The two roles have different possibilities. Hamlet tries to reach Polonius behind the arras; Gertrude tries to protect him. A procedurally generated stage places bodies, barriers, and furniture into changing configurations. The project also experiments with genetic algorithms that test candidate layouts through simulated matches.

you are rhyme asks what happens when theatrical interpretation is made operational: when a pause, an emphatic line, or a departure from the text is no longer only a matter of expression, but a consequential move inside a playable system.