WOULD SHAKESPEARE BE WRITING FOR VIDEOGAMES IF WERE WRITING TODAY? I posted here about how some fifty years ago, a friend told me that if Shakespeare were our contemporary, he would be writing for movies because (in the 60’s) that was the biggest potential audience. I accepted this, and in the 70’s I thought of Shakespeare as writing for television. I suggested at the end of that earlier post that today he might be writing for videogames.
In an article on “gamification” in the New Yorker (September 14, 2015), Nathan Heller pointed to statistics on how big an audience videogamers comprise: 42% of Americans play videogames at least three hours a week. (This is not an average so the avid videogamers who play for long hours each week don’t influence the statistic.) Three quarters of that 42% are adults and 44% of that 42% are female. A very large audience—much larger than I would have thought. Surely, if Shakespeare were around today, he would be doing videogames.
It isn’t always the case, but video games frequently have very intricate plots that can play out over dozens of hours. I find it frustrating when movies get described as “like a video game,” suggesting that there wasn’t much plot at all. Indeed, one of the biggest problems with movies based on video games is they try to come up with a new plot and shoehorn it into a movie instead of just using the excellent story that was already there.