[david_shaw]

> You can do all those things and more with other games. Eg: street fighter.

While you're right (all ages can play Street Fighter), it's hardly something that one can expect to be common in, say, 45 years. Chess will certainly still be played ubiquitously.

Furthermore, Street Fighter requires good reaction times, hand/eye coordination, etc. A better counter-point might be something like poker (or another card game).

That said, you're right: if you don't find chess (as a game) interesting, you probably shouldn't spend time pursuing it :)

[explorer666]

Street Fighter has been here for about 26 years, and it's only growing. It's going professional, with sponsors for the players and everything :p

And by the way, I too thought the reactions needed were insane. But after some time, you realize all that is just muscle memory, and the hard part is the strategy. It's a conversation between two minds.

[vijayr]

I'd like to add Scrabble to this list - it will be around in 45 years for sure, though the number of people playing is orders of magnitude smaller than Chess

[S4M]

Provided you like it, Scrabble can also be nice to acquire new vocabularies in foreign languages.

[chillacy]

True, in fact the french scrabble champion recently doesn't even speak french, he just memorized a ton of words: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/21/424980378/...

[Nadya]

This is interesting in and of itself. I think it would be interesting to have a linguistic conversation surrounding it. This is akin to memorizing gibberish (in this case, words without meaning). Which is more difficult than it sounds!

I'm amazed that he also (intuitively) figured out "the French sound" (the linguistic term escapes me) well enough to be able to call out words for not being words. I wouldn't be surprised if many French speakers tried to sneak some high scoring words past him, knowing he can't speak French only to be flabbergasted when he called their bluff.

[knughit]

French has less hybrid linguistic heritage than English, so its orthography is much more regular. Scrabble is a very English game.