Features// Nolan Bushnell at BAFTA

The concept of a ‘social game’ and family entertainment is one that mirrors Nintendo’s recent efforts in the industry with the Wii and Nintendo DS. In particular, Bushnell is keen to discuss female interaction with computer games, later lamenting the decrease of women playing games during the mid-1980s as the products contained increasingly more violent material. According to Bushnell, in some ways, today’s ‘casual’ gamer is merely a re-interpretation of those who enjoyed the accessibility of games during the 1970s.

Speaking of the Wii, the Atari founder is a big fan. “I love the Wii and what it does to open up play, so that anyone can sit down and have a go at a game. In fact, I’ll predict that the next few years will be dedicated to physicality in gaming, one way or another. Tracking your movements on screen and actually being a part of the action physically, I think it would just remove all barriers when it comes to the average person wanting to play.”

With that in mind, it’s easy to see where Bushnell is coming from in his new venture, uWink - a social, casual gaming space where touch screen panels are used to order food, play games and perform other interesting activities. “There is a new type of game that we’re trying to do here, I call it the ‘social game’. If you sit someone down in a bar and give him or her a video game, the conversation drops pretty radically. You’re focused on the game. However, if you’re at home playing a board game with friends, the conversation is increased as you interact with others. This is something I’m trying to recreate with uWink.”

Games that Bushnell ran through included a ‘Truth or Dare’ game that has no real goal other than to reveal secrets or perform a forfeit (“Girls love to talk about stuff like that, and the game’s become one of our most popular titles”). There's also a six-player version of Pong where better players are challenged with an increasingly smaller paddle as the game plays on. It’s a far cry from Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time, a kid’s restaurant that was launched after Bushnell sold Atari to Warner in the late 1970s.

“With Chuck E. Cheese, I wanted to create a restaurant where kids could be king. Every kid has parents giving them rules to abide by and stuff, but everyone knows that kids just want to create chaos. And it was pretty chaotic – as an adult you didn’t want to be there. It was loud, it was crazy, and the food was bad… the only reason you’d go is if you had kids, and the only reason kids wanted to go was for the games.

The pizza was simply a life support system for a big arcade.” When asked if Chuck E. Cheese was meant as a way to reinvent the arcade scene, Bushnell agreed and said that the arcade culture is pretty much dead, unless there are ticketed prizes to be won. London’s Trocadero, its popularity a shadow of its former SEGA World self, is surely proof of that.

The floor soon opened to questions from the audience, ranging from the games and people that most influenced him. “The early Doom games were a technological tour de force… Tetris is a wonderful game… I love Halo, and The Sims – basically anything by Will Wright I think is amazing and so characteristic”.

He was also quizzed on “acceptable” violence in gaming (“It’s OK to kill really, really bad guys, like aliens and stuff. In Grand Theft Auto though, there are people who don’t need to be killed, you don’t want to kill the good guys”.

With the popularity of Xbox Live and Microsoft’s ‘social experience’ marketing push, I thought I would ask Bushnell about his thoughts regarding online gaming. “It’s awkward, really. The Internet is a social medium, that’s true, but it’s very stilted and flat. ‘Social’ is literally being in physical reach of someone – buying someone a drink and hitting your mates if they beat you at a game. The Internet may seem social but it’s really not that cool, especially if the person on the other end of the line turns out to be some 40-year-old guy in his underpants.”

I guess that’s one way of putting it. Stay tuned on more from Andy Nuttall – whose new book on the history of video gaming will be featured in SPOnG's forthcoming podcast!