Star Wars is an aberration to the normal availability of movies, not the rule. That’s why it is notable.
That games are exclusive to certain systems is the general rule, not the exception.
It’s a pity you don’t like the panel, as I think it has a lot of promise. Just not with the current focus or title. But a rundown of super influential games in some form is good.
A good panel has something to say. This panel basically has no thesis. If it has one, it is extremely weak sauce. I like to have a powerful thesis. Consider these theses from panels we have done in the past:
eSports should be run the same way real sports are run, with labor unions and everything else.
If a game has a shitty community, then that is primarily because the design of the game encourages shitty behavior and attracts shitty people.
Even if you do a very good job of competitively balancing the numbers in your game, it will never be truly balanced if you do not account for the inherent imbalances imposed by society, genetics, etc.
I felt like the tabletop board game panel had a good thesis. Something like what you should learn to become a “player of games”. I enjoyed the panel so much I watched two different versions on YouTube.
I feel like there is a strong thesis that could be supported by talking about the 40 most formative video games over the last 30 years. Once that has clicked, much of the content could be as you tried in this podcast.
It just can’t be “you must play these games/sports” because that just isn’t possible or helpful, unlike similar panels about movies or TV or board games.
This gives me another better panel idea, though.
Obviously all art is changed over time by the context of the world. Watching Star Wars now is different than watching it amid the hoopla of 1977.
But consider the difference in playing Street Fighter II in an arcade in 1991 vs. playing it in 2018. The difference is insanely dramatic. That initial experience didn’t even last to the end of the decade. Not even just the technological reasons, but also social and economic factors seem to impact the staying power of video games (or software in general?) more than any other medium.
Even if someone puts a large effort into “preserving” a video game, it seems almost impossible for players to experience even close to the same thing that other players experienced when a game was first released. Obviously multiplayer online games are hit the hardest, but even single player offline games are victims as well. Why are these experiences so fragile, and is it possible to make a video game that will be less so?
I think there is a parallel to movies, but mostly comedy movies.
Action and horror and science fiction and a lot of genre’s hold up over time really well, despite us having to excuse some special effects. But a comedy can feel out of date by the same time the next year! And it’s not just movies with pop culture references like a lot of parody movies, but just the comedy sensibilities of the time.
So while some comedy movies can last more than one generation, the vast majority don’t. And some video games last from one console generation to the next, but most don’t. I mean, there will always be a limited fan base or player group for old games, but most people are moving on to the new thing.