Look Who it Was Random video

Masters Among Us

545 views · Published 27 August 2010 · 55:22 · Indexed 22 September 2026

Channel: Georgia Tech · 2010 · Education

Watch on YouTube

Keynote address presented at Art History of Games Symposium, February 4, 2010 in the High Museum of Art's Rich Auditorium on the campus of the Woodruff Arts Center, in midtown Atlanta. The symposium was presented by Georgia Tech and the Savannah College of Art and Design.

Artists in other mediums look back upon their masters and, intrigued, inspired or challenged by their methods and works, they innovate upon them in dramatic ways. Just as Cubism followed Impressionism, so too did RPGs follow war games and 3D follow 2D. Since the dawn of the digital industry, game designers and programmers pushed technology beyond its bounds, and on the granular level, millions of seemingly trivial mechanic innovations made the medium and cultural art form what it is today. 

Our masters still walk among us. Interestingly, however, few practicing game designers and even fewer experiencing their works know the masters among them. Study of their methods has fallen to consumption of modern output. Careful consideration of design methods has given way to repeating past failures. Regrettably, many of our works, like the works of the Renaissance, are simply lost or the design process unrecorded. 

John Romero discusses the masters among us, who they are, why we need them, how they have influenced today's greatest games and what we will learn from them in the future.

Materials hosted by SMARTech, Georgia Tech's institutional repository, http://smartech.gatech.edu/.

More from this channel