20/03/2009

Interview with Nolan Bushnell

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PONG

I attended an inspiring interview with Nolan Bushnell at BAFTA last night. A wildly successful charismatic character, in an unassuming kind of way, Bushnell of Atari and Pong fame took us on an informal excursion into his innovations in gaming c1970 through to his current uWink business.

Avoid missing ball for high score

The common thread which ran through his anecdotes was one of unfailing optimism and self belief coupled with a fascination for play. He built the Atari console after being unable to convince an established game publisher to take on Pong - ball missed; Chuck E.Cheese because he understood that kids do not want to sit still and talk quietly at diner but want to run around and cause havoc. Chuck E. Cheese now turns over $1bn a year.

It was refreshing to hear about these adventures. Like many designers intent on developing interesting ways to engage with people, his ‘let’s just do it’ attitude is what we seek out in others and often precisely what is needed. The experimentation of investigation that leads to new understandings any connections.

Engineering in fun

His work is the precursor to so much of modern gaming, many view him as the founding father of computer gaming. The underlying sense of philosophy to games and motivation can be seen directly in today’s Nintendo Wii. When Bushnell talks about social gaming he is interested especially in the embodied physical social experience rather than the distributed network experience of online gaming, predicting the continued growth and development of gestural interaction to a point where participation is simply a matter of moving ones body to effect change, negating the need for an additional input controller.

Other stories included his decision to incorporate “reflexing” into gameplay. Everyone is aware what it is like to play a game against a more skilled opponent. It’s great to improve your own game but also a little demoralizing. Bushnell introduced a simple handicap system whereby the difficulty of play altered in response to the players skill. So in multi-player Pong this meant that the more a player hit (“hogged”) the ball, the shorter their paddle became until it eventually disappeared. This meant that the player had to depend on their team mates.

When asked about his preference for modern game pads compared to the joystick he found that players could excerpt a massive amount of energy when they are getting beaten and there was no way to make an affordable joystick robust enough to withstand the reflected punishment or as Bushnell observed “Physics killed the joystick.”

TV glitch art

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My TV has been malfunctioning recently to create beautiful visual glitches. I’m enjoying the idea of it becoming an autonomous art generating machine. The glitches remind me of Brian Eno’s 7 million paintings, Autechre and Casey Reas’s generative art amongst others. Each of these artists use algorithms with a sensitive dependence upon initial conditions. The process produces a cornucopia of results which although preconceived programatically often render random unforeseen artifacts as the program runs. Their talent is in giving this randomness meaning.

Variables

The computer as a result becomes part author in the creative process. As a designer who writes code, I find this approach to creative expression fascinating. There is an exactness to programming. Syntax is formal and a rogue ; or missed { means the difference between an idea compiling or not. It is scientific. On the other side there is subjective beauty. An oft unquantifiable, emotion response. It is artistic. The computer has engendered a new breed of creative. A technological astuteness with a sensitive dependence upon emotional conditions.

There are however few truly original talents who manage to balance the left and right hemispheres with apparent ease which is not surprising given many people’s natural bias for one or other. I’m thinking of Maeda, Levin, Nakamura, Rokeby. I asked David Rokeby about this diversity of discipline.

“What is lovely is that the are such different spaces that they have no terms in which to describe or understand the other, and for me, this is gold. They define two independent dimensions, and as such, instead of being in opposition, create a massive sense of space (or more literally “area”) between them”.David Rokeby

The one off

When compared to hand rendered work, programs can run infinite times producing precisely the same result each time. The hand of the computer is plain to see.

Hand rendering however cannot achieve this and as such displays wonderful qualities of uniqueness, the one off. The hand of the human is plain to see. .

In some ways randomness is a way for the programmer/artist to imbue a sense of one-offness. It can bring sterile exactness to life, add unknowns and in doing so reveal a more humanistic sense of involvement or as Rokeby explained more poetically;

“Something as hard and precise as a computer has something in common with a mirror… we reflect off it in interesting ways”.

Happy accidents

So as the TV continues to blink, stutter and scramble through an episode of Stars on Skates or some other guff the broadcasters typically push out I’m rather more interested in the ingenious patterns a malfunctioning chip has happened to create.

Below is a collection of some of these which made “Homes under the Hammer” actually worth watching. Do I get it fixed?… not quite yet.

If you have examples of creative serendipity drop a comment below.