IDEAS: We live now in a world where people often are sitting alone in a room playing something. Very different from the Atari philosophy, which, to me, was about games as a social experience. The games were always better with two players.
MONTFORT: I wouldn’t want to argue that the Atari way was better. But it has a different concept of how people will play together. Maybe we forgot some things that were good about play experience. Maybe we want the computer to be a device that is more like a hearth that members of the family come around and use to interact with each other.
Nick Montfort on Atari and video games in the Boston Globe
“I wouldn’t want to argue that the Atari way was better. But it has a different concept of how people will play together.”