Would Shakespeare Have Been a Good Game Designer?

[Leodiensian]

If Shakespeare was alive to day he would be a playwright. There's really no reason to think otherwise -- plays still exist, and people still go to them.

True plays are still in existence, but they are in no way the populist medium that plays were back then. The play nowadays is considered much more for the middle and upper classes, whereas everyone watched plays in Shakespeare's day.

Before Shakespeare, plays only appealed to the upper class for the most part. He was the one that started them as a popular medium of entertainment for the masses.

I say thee nay, good sir. Poetry and drama alike had been popular across class boundaries for a long time before Shakespeare showed up.

Look up the term "mystery play". This is "mystery" is a different sense from "murder mystery", by the way.

Plays were performed commonly in taverns and inns. Remember that even in Shakespeare's time literacy rates were pretty poor and stretching back they would have been even worse. You couldn't hand out leaflets explaining religious or moral messages. What you did was put on plays acting out scenes like the nativity, or the passion of the Christ, or the Garden of Eden, or any number of religious allegories you cared to think of. These would often have bawdy jokes or slapstick humour thrown in to pander to the crowd and keep their attention.

 

[viciouspen]

All I know is that Salinger would not have made a good game developer...or Hemmingway for that matter....although....he might have been great at First Person Shooters.

Too soon?

 

[De Ronneman]

Shakespeare would never be able to get enough emotion in a character, adn still keep playing options.

The extreme difference between a play, which does it's own thing without intevention, and a game, which requires a player failing and succeeding every once in a while, would make it impossible to even compare it...

 

[Veylon]

A good game designer? I doubt it. Shakespeare was not the collaborative sort and hated his work being screwed around with.

I'd see him making movies like Lucas or Spielberg or Cameron. He had a genius for appealing to the common man and bringing the pompous down to earth. The same intelligentsia that love him today reviled him in person as a man who debased the media.

I've never heard that he hated his work being screwed around with. I don't doubt it, I just found it interesting. Do you have a link?

Sadly, I don't. However, I feel strongly that is part of what the play bit in Hamlet was about: the producer demanding changes in a play and able to get away with it because he has the money. A jibe, if you will, at the no-doubt numerous producers Shakespeare himself had to deal with demanding this or that be changed in his plays. "Romeo and Juliet is a bit of a downer, why not a happy ending for my party, Will?"

 

[brodie21]

no, no, no, no, no...........just no

 

[matrix guardian]

I have a feeling that if he were into making games, he would be at odds with any big publishers. They tend to like games that you can make sequel after sequel after squel etc. Shakespeare's style doesn't lend well to sequels, as he often kills off all the main characters. Not to mention the flak he would get from the gamers that they died when they got to the end, after they successfully completed the game. Also, media companies tend to sort of be afraid of anything less than a happy ending. For example, the movie Dodgeball. The REAL ending is in the special features. Or if you have ever seen the movie The TV Set. Anyway, its about how the producers alter and cheapen the creator's artistic vision, to create something less meaningful and of lower artistic quality thats more like everything else, but that will appeal to a broader audience (make more money).

 

[Paul Christian Bills]

In case anyone on the planet it still reading this thread, I have a blog post about Shakespeare's The Tempest as a video game here:

http://teamshakespeare.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-tempest-video-game.html

Shakespeare was a medium innovator, and he did steal--the reason he was so creative was because he could steal stories and add to them. He innovated old stories for the renewed medium of theatre so much that what started as base entertainment for the lowest classes became an event that the queen attended. I think it's entirely possible that if Shakespeare were alive today, he could do for video games what he did for theatre.