Nolan Bushnell compares "social videogames" to board games

05/28/2008 Jrnl/Videogames

Gotta love Nolan Bushnell. He’s always good for a sound-byte, whether it’s funny, or just plain thought-provoking.

Social games aren’t sitting in boxer shorts in your basement … It’s being out, having fun, being able to hi-five people around the table, and it’s a bridge between traditional board games, which are highly social experiences in the home, and a video game. The idea is to create games in which the conversations among the people are as important as the gameplay itself.

Of course, what’s funny about being a middle-ground between videogames and board games is, board games are, in some ways, even geekier than videogames. I’m not talking about people who get together to play a game of Scrabble, or the family occasionally getting together for a round of Clue.

You have to realize, when Bushnell founded Atari, he didn’t just make the name up. Atari is actually a word used in the board game, Go. It’s kind of like how you announce, “check,” when you are one move away from capturing the King in Chess. It’s at this point one must realize: Bushnell was into some board games most Americans consider obscure, before he founded Atari.

In other words: he was a board game geek., and that particular lot is, arguably, even further away from the mainstream than most videogamers. We’re talking about things like weekly meet-ups for Settlers of Catan geeky.

So, what’s ironic to me about Bushnell’s comment, is the fact that he says he’s trying to make videogames more social and more “normal” by making them more similar to board games, which are, in many respects less “normal.”

Comment [231]

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You are right, that is somewhat amusing viewed in that context. On the other hand, almost every family has played Monopoly or Scrabble or Chess at some point and these more ‘mainstream’ board games are probably what he meant.

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