Game Devs on Ebert's Put-Downs

Gamsutra has a writeup of a recent Austin Game Developers meeting. Damion Schubert, Allen Varney, and Scott Jennings took the stage to discuss games as art and Roger Ebert's opinions. From the article: "McShaffry then asked the panel to consider whether Ebert was picking on youth culture in general, and assuming technology wasn't an issue, whether popular games like Grand Theft Auto would be played 500 years from now, like the works of Shakespeare are enjoyed today? Jennings didn't want to speculate that far into the future, but he admitted to still playing and liking the Final Fantasy games released for the Super Nintendo."

Comments

Absolutely!

[TheoB]

Five hundred years, people! Years! I mean, it's incomprehensible that something s frivolous as a game would remain a cultural staple that long! Name one game that people were playing 500 years ago that they still play today.

I mean, except chess, which was also a product of the rennaisance.

And checkers which by some accounts predates the Epic of Gilgamesh by about a thousand years.

And go, mancala, tic-tac-toe, golf, of course...

-1, It Just Ain't So

[Haeleth]

Shakespeare's plays were never published in his lifetime.

On the contrary, the majority of his plays were published in his lifetime, and often very soon after they were first written. Hamlet, for example, was probably written some time between 1599 and 1601: the first authorised printed edition was published in 1604, at most 5 years after the work was written, and some 12 years before Shakespeare's death.

(Hamlet is an interesting example, actually, because it's thought to be a remake of a previous play by someone else, which was probably less than 10 years old when Shakespeare wrote his version. Try doing something like that today, and see how long it takes for the lawsuit to arrive...)

The idea that plays could be read for pleasure, that English drama was something more than disposable popular entertainment scarcely exists before the death of Shakespeare.

This is also incorrect. Printed playscripts were extremely popular within Shakespeare's own lifetime, as witness the vast number of unauthorised editions of his plays (the first pirated Hamlet appeared in 1603, a year before the first authorised edition). Nobody would have gone to the considerable expense of printing a text that they did not expect to sell, and they did not sell these playscripts to other acting companies.

In future, please consider doing a little basic fact-checking before you stand up and start pretending to be an expert.