Atari founder Nolan Bushnell on why life is 'a game'(bbc.com)
bbc.com
Atari founder Nolan Bushnell on why life is 'a game'
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-33117769
15 comments
Investing in monomaniacs can be much more successful than investing in normal well adjusted people.
Which is a problem with incentives around investing, not with normal, "well-adjusted" people. It should be pretty clear now that the market strives to remove all human values not relevant to increasing abstract profit numbers. We are literally losing our humanity over this. And the best thing? If we continue, it may well end up that an automated economy will become a closed loop, running by itself without the need for human input or existence.
Some people fear we code up a Paperclip Maximizer, but it could be that we'll accidentally build one in pursuit of profits.
Some people fear we code up a Paperclip Maximizer, but it could be that we'll accidentally build one in pursuit of profits.
Hasn't this already happened with HFTs?
Some terrifyingly large proportion of the money markets runs on pure code already - which is terrifying because we're not even a democracy now, but some kind of bizarre automated profit-seeking cybernetic metacreature.
Some terrifyingly large proportion of the money markets runs on pure code already - which is terrifying because we're not even a democracy now, but some kind of bizarre automated profit-seeking cybernetic metacreature.
What's a democracy in your book? Who's `we', and were they ever a democracy?
Capitalism systematically makes humans into cogs in a machine. Now it replaces the cogs it considers defective (flesh) with ones which cannot fail it (silicon).
I've hung out with him a few times. He's actually a really fun, down-to-earth guy (he loves cracking really, really stupid jokes). He's also a really passionate, ambitious person, and he's just not capable of dreaming small. When he decides to do something, he's in, 100%, and he values that same kind of ambition in other people. That doesn't mean you have to be a workaholic as a kid, it just means you were passionate enough about something to go out and do something about it (when I was a kid, I started a stupid video game magazine — because it was fun).
“Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/opinion/sunday/the-entrepr...
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/opinion/sunday/the-entrepr...
I'll presume you're not someone trying to rationalize their own laziness or manipulate young whippersnappers not to make geezers look bad.
For anyone that wants to be a rich founder, almost sensible but definitely effective workaholism can help. The main issue is that only a few people are motivated enough (irrespective of vesting schedule and equity share classes) to get shit done while everyone else wants to look busy or shift work to those sort of folks. They have a name: dead weight freeloaders. Be the fast, effective shit doer because there's no room in awesome for sloppy, lazy crap and excuses like retail employees try to pass off every day.
For anyone that wants to be a rich founder, almost sensible but definitely effective workaholism can help. The main issue is that only a few people are motivated enough (irrespective of vesting schedule and equity share classes) to get shit done while everyone else wants to look busy or shift work to those sort of folks. They have a name: dead weight freeloaders. Be the fast, effective shit doer because there's no room in awesome for sloppy, lazy crap and excuses like retail employees try to pass off every day.
Goes hand-in-hand with his other quote: "I have made so many massive mistakes of ego, I can't tell you."
I stopped reading it because it was very clear that his ego is still giant. And it's not surprising that the Steam circus has some of the same ego issues.
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I'm sure many of us did some sort of business when we were kids.
Trading anything with your friends (cards, etc) is a business, especially if those trades make the value of your collection go up or down. Buying these items new (cards in a pack) could sort of be an investment scheme.
If you held onto anything worth money from your childhood, you could call that a buy and hold scheme.
Creating in-game value by trading, selling and acquiring items in an MMORPG is a business if you could cash out that value through trading sites.
Some kids sell weed and other illegal items.
Trading anything with your friends (cards, etc) is a business, especially if those trades make the value of your collection go up or down. Buying these items new (cards in a pack) could sort of be an investment scheme.
If you held onto anything worth money from your childhood, you could call that a buy and hold scheme.
Creating in-game value by trading, selling and acquiring items in an MMORPG is a business if you could cash out that value through trading sites.
Some kids sell weed and other illegal items.
> I'm sure many of us did some sort of business when we were kids.
> Trading anything with your friends (cards, etc) is a business, especially if those trades make the value of your collection go up or down. Buying these items new (cards in a pack) could sort of be an investment scheme.
> If you held onto anything worth money from your childhood, you could call that a buy and hold scheme.
> Creating in-game value by trading, selling and acquiring items in an MMORPG is a business if you could cash out that value through trading sites.
The capacity of some posters on this board to redefine simple and well known words into something entirely different in order to fit a very warped vision of things never ceases to amaze me.
> Trading anything with your friends (cards, etc) is a business, especially if those trades make the value of your collection go up or down. Buying these items new (cards in a pack) could sort of be an investment scheme.
> If you held onto anything worth money from your childhood, you could call that a buy and hold scheme.
> Creating in-game value by trading, selling and acquiring items in an MMORPG is a business if you could cash out that value through trading sites.
The capacity of some posters on this board to redefine simple and well known words into something entirely different in order to fit a very warped vision of things never ceases to amaze me.
Well, this is a basic skill of a programmer, or even an engineer in general. It's not about fitting a very warped vision, it's about applying different models to the same situation. As long as you keep in mind that you're just applying models, you'll be fine. If you forget about it, you'll end up becoming a politician.
feel free to replace model with dogma, when talking about politicians
What word is that? Business?
Keep in mind that we are referring to children (under the age of 18.) These sorts of transactions are often the first steps into the realization that you can grow value (which could be physical or virtual items) through transactions with others (this could be smart trading or selling something you created.) These first steps could be powerful lessons which may shape their future.
If I sell a baseball card and I make a profit, then that profit would likely be recorded on a Schedule C (Form 1040), Profit or Loss From Business.
http://www.irs.gov/uac/Schedule-C-(Form-1040),-Profit-or-Los...
Just by selling that card, you are a sole proprietorship.
If you get creative, you can think of many different ways in which children participate in business activity.
ETA: Okay, I get it. My examples aren't of people starting companies. A kid selling baseball cards might be a business, but not a company (company is a group, more than one.) I wonder if that's what he actually meant though. Can a minor even hire employees?
Keep in mind that we are referring to children (under the age of 18.) These sorts of transactions are often the first steps into the realization that you can grow value (which could be physical or virtual items) through transactions with others (this could be smart trading or selling something you created.) These first steps could be powerful lessons which may shape their future.
If I sell a baseball card and I make a profit, then that profit would likely be recorded on a Schedule C (Form 1040), Profit or Loss From Business.
http://www.irs.gov/uac/Schedule-C-(Form-1040),-Profit-or-Los...
Just by selling that card, you are a sole proprietorship.
If you get creative, you can think of many different ways in which children participate in business activity.
ETA: Okay, I get it. My examples aren't of people starting companies. A kid selling baseball cards might be a business, but not a company (company is a group, more than one.) I wonder if that's what he actually meant though. Can a minor even hire employees?
You have just described how politics and media work these days.
If we are taking his words as deliberate, there is a huge difference between offering a small service on a bulletin board and "starting a company".
Yawn! Anyone can say hyperbolic stuff like that. You have to, to be quoted. E.g. there are only two hard problems in computer science etc.
well at least with the latter it implies a third problem that could be very broad and cover everything ;-)
> "I've always valued passionate employees over anything else, and, it turns out that there's a huge percentage of the population that are actually dead - they don't know it, but, in terms of their processes, they're just waiting to be buried"
I'm sure he did value passionate employees, especially in light of the positive way in which describes Jobs sleeping under his desk (and the poor bastards described in the article who were working on a Saturday). I wonder how many of those under the desk employees got a cut of his $30 million Atari payday. Not one I bet.
Wisdom is understanding that others don't have the same drives and ambitions that you do and not judging them for it. Sounds like this guy still hasn't learned this at 70+
I'm sure he did value passionate employees, especially in light of the positive way in which describes Jobs sleeping under his desk (and the poor bastards described in the article who were working on a Saturday). I wonder how many of those under the desk employees got a cut of his $30 million Atari payday. Not one I bet.
Wisdom is understanding that others don't have the same drives and ambitions that you do and not judging them for it. Sounds like this guy still hasn't learned this at 70+
I wonder how many of those under the desk employees got a cut of his $30 million Atari payday. Not one I bet.
You could also infer that a lot of people have to suffer, e.g. hard work for little reward, for a small number of people to win big. Making big bucks requires, more often than not, less than ideal treatment of others unless you have a magical algorithm in your pocket that solves a big problem. You sell a physical product? This goes doubly so. It's just abstracted so it's harder to see.
On the personal life side of things, which is kind of below the belt but I'm not making a moral judgement, do you think CEO X can be super-dad/mum when they're working until midnight? Sure, they show up when a kid has a birthday but they have to outsource a lot of parenting because they've made the decision that a career is more important than playing a bigger part in their child's life. Not everyone can make that kind of decision, and those who do tend to be the kind of person who yearns to "make big things".
Quote from TFA: there's a huge percentage of the population that are actually dead - they don't know it, but, in terms of their processes, they're just waiting to be buried"
The people who think this don't realize or appreciate that they make their fortunes from the "dead". Most of the time, not always but most of the time, it's the guy with the boring 8-5 job who comes home to play his video game console, eat his microwave healthy-choice dinner, bathe using the new showergel that will surely get him pussy like the ad said he would, and go to sleep using his special pillow with proper neck support that he ordered from an infomercial.
You feed off these people, and then say fuck it, they might as well be dead because they can't work on "big things". Let's see how Uber would do if they could only pick up founders in the Valley or SF. Not well.
You could also infer that a lot of people have to suffer, e.g. hard work for little reward, for a small number of people to win big. Making big bucks requires, more often than not, less than ideal treatment of others unless you have a magical algorithm in your pocket that solves a big problem. You sell a physical product? This goes doubly so. It's just abstracted so it's harder to see.
On the personal life side of things, which is kind of below the belt but I'm not making a moral judgement, do you think CEO X can be super-dad/mum when they're working until midnight? Sure, they show up when a kid has a birthday but they have to outsource a lot of parenting because they've made the decision that a career is more important than playing a bigger part in their child's life. Not everyone can make that kind of decision, and those who do tend to be the kind of person who yearns to "make big things".
Quote from TFA: there's a huge percentage of the population that are actually dead - they don't know it, but, in terms of their processes, they're just waiting to be buried"
The people who think this don't realize or appreciate that they make their fortunes from the "dead". Most of the time, not always but most of the time, it's the guy with the boring 8-5 job who comes home to play his video game console, eat his microwave healthy-choice dinner, bathe using the new showergel that will surely get him pussy like the ad said he would, and go to sleep using his special pillow with proper neck support that he ordered from an infomercial.
You feed off these people, and then say fuck it, they might as well be dead because they can't work on "big things". Let's see how Uber would do if they could only pick up founders in the Valley or SF. Not well.
He's basically saying, "i want smart suckers. people who'll work their asses off to make me as money as possible, and will get fucked at the end of the line"
The documentary "Once Upon Atari" explains the story of the consumer division (Atari 2600). Some of their best game developers left to form Activision after they tried to renegotiate their compensation with the new CEO and failed (this was post-Bushnell when Atari started making real serious money). After third-party games became legitimized, dozens of game companies sprouted up and tried to poach people from Atari. This put enough pressure on the Atari management to give release bonuses and $0.10/cartridge royalties that made a bunch of the developers millionaires.
This was just one step in an incredible journey for Steve Jobs. He probably put in the long hours because he saw value in those hours. He probably learned a lot from the experience.
Yep. Like getting Woz (who had a day job) to come in out of hours and do a lot of the work, then take the credit for it, and then not give Woz a fair share of the bonus...
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/steve-wozniak-cried-jobs-kept-atari...
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/steve-wozniak-cried-jobs-kept-atari...
Sheesh, this guy has been in the industry longer than most at age 72 and it shocked me when I read, "a handful of young men are eagerly banging away on keyboards late on a Saturday afternoon" - then to top it all off further into the article he says, "How many companies have you started by the time you're 18? If the answer's zero, I wouldn't invest in you," he says of their entrepreneurial verve (after explaining pretty much everything he did post-Atari was a mistake).
Crunch does not make for efficiency. Look at EA if you want to see what crunch does (besides make your employees and families miserable). Sounds like Bushnell has made a lot of mistakes in his time and his latest startup and the way it is being run is another example of a man who clearly has lost touch with the industry he help kickstart back in the 70's.
Crunch does not make for efficiency. Look at EA if you want to see what crunch does (besides make your employees and families miserable). Sounds like Bushnell has made a lot of mistakes in his time and his latest startup and the way it is being run is another example of a man who clearly has lost touch with the industry he help kickstart back in the 70's.
> it shocked me when I read, "a handful of young men are eagerly banging away on keyboards late on a Saturday afternoon"
It's not so unreasonable to work on a Saturday afternoon. As PG says, "If you’re ever unsure if you should be doing what you’re doing during YC, ask yourself this question: ‘Am I building our product? Am I talking to users? Am I exercising?’. if you’re not doing one of these things, you’re doing the wrong thing."
> Crunch does not make for efficiency. Look at EA if you want to see what crunch does
I don't know much about EA but their stock value seems okay:
https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...
(Though if the recent rise is due to changed policies around crunchtime, that would be really interesting and I'd love to learn about that.)
It's not so unreasonable to work on a Saturday afternoon. As PG says, "If you’re ever unsure if you should be doing what you’re doing during YC, ask yourself this question: ‘Am I building our product? Am I talking to users? Am I exercising?’. if you’re not doing one of these things, you’re doing the wrong thing."
> Crunch does not make for efficiency. Look at EA if you want to see what crunch does
I don't know much about EA but their stock value seems okay:
https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...
(Though if the recent rise is due to changed policies around crunchtime, that would be really interesting and I'd love to learn about that.)
Stock value seems okay
Stock value being, of course, the only moral determinant here. Even if you're using employees as a consumable, ea_spouse passim.
Stock value being, of course, the only moral determinant here. Even if you're using employees as a consumable, ea_spouse passim.
These young men were employees, not owners.
I'm surprised that HN hasn't applied some version of the standard critique of Capitalism already. It's practically de rigueur in fashionable intellectual circles. And in this case it's so easy, an amateur like me can make a decent stab at it.
First of all, we enter the text with a remark about "mistakes of ego". One ego mistake is to conflate "life" with some activity that is taken to be "life-defining" or "the meaning of life". This is a Western preoccupation that stems from Christian spiritual angst with respect to the relationship between "good works" and salvation (this is very complex, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_S... for details and note the differences between the Catholic and Protestant teachings. The psychological implications of the doctrinal differences are far beyond my ability to untangle).
So here this is applied as follows: conflating life with the process of gaining salvation through good works which in a Capitalist society translates into "game playing" a.k.a. using capital to innovate and earn a return on investment.
Of course none of this helps when it comes time to contemplate mortality. It doesn't matter how much you play nor how many times you win, you'll still be stuck with this over-developed existential angst which was the thing that prodded you to work so hard in the first place.
> When you lose a game of chess, you don't go and jump off a bridge, you reset the pieces and do it again.
> It's a game
The game playing, the "reset the pieces", the conflation of life with the game, and the talk of suicide seem to suggest an element unacknowledged in the text, the idea of the cycle of death and rebirth. It may be a coincidence, but I think the attitude of the Buddhists with respect to this cycle may be connected with their attitude toward games vs. the process by which wisdom arises, but who knows?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Buddha_games
OK, that's my critique. How did I score?
First of all, we enter the text with a remark about "mistakes of ego". One ego mistake is to conflate "life" with some activity that is taken to be "life-defining" or "the meaning of life". This is a Western preoccupation that stems from Christian spiritual angst with respect to the relationship between "good works" and salvation (this is very complex, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_S... for details and note the differences between the Catholic and Protestant teachings. The psychological implications of the doctrinal differences are far beyond my ability to untangle).
So here this is applied as follows: conflating life with the process of gaining salvation through good works which in a Capitalist society translates into "game playing" a.k.a. using capital to innovate and earn a return on investment.
Of course none of this helps when it comes time to contemplate mortality. It doesn't matter how much you play nor how many times you win, you'll still be stuck with this over-developed existential angst which was the thing that prodded you to work so hard in the first place.
> When you lose a game of chess, you don't go and jump off a bridge, you reset the pieces and do it again.
> It's a game
The game playing, the "reset the pieces", the conflation of life with the game, and the talk of suicide seem to suggest an element unacknowledged in the text, the idea of the cycle of death and rebirth. It may be a coincidence, but I think the attitude of the Buddhists with respect to this cycle may be connected with their attitude toward games vs. the process by which wisdom arises, but who knows?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Buddha_games
OK, that's my critique. How did I score?
Bushnell sees dead people.
Perhaps he's right, but maybe not in the way he expects.
Perhaps he's right, but maybe not in the way he expects.
It's hard for anyone in a capitalist society, stuck in the socio-sick-environment to erase the conflation of monetary success with freedom. So we falsely assume a grind, a saturday crunch, for the "small" underdog-company-spin-of-the-wheel means that you have a company of all loyal, blood-brotherly employees. It's a nice thought if 1) the company ends up being successful, and 2) the employees actually have a bit of equity. But most of the time, these spiritual kind of ideas and feelings are just abused to justify treating employees like shit to exact a capitalistic work efficiency from them. It's definitely an airy kind of issue. And I'm not sold on the whole 'crunch' thing. Though as a programmer, when I work on my own projects, I know that crunching means I'm passionate. So it's very hard to separate that and have some solidarity for a normal work situation where I have balance and yet feel as if I'm not just "sucking" on the situation for a slow rolling accomodating situation, and well, that whole 'slow burial.' Maybe I am just slowly rotting away with my current passion for work. Just maybe..
How many companies have you started by the time you're 18? If the answer's zero, I wouldn't invest in you.
After his breakout success in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Mr Bushnell made several missteps that eventually led to some entrepreneurial failures and financial ruin.
That's fine, I wouldn't invest in you, either.
After his breakout success in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Mr Bushnell made several missteps that eventually led to some entrepreneurial failures and financial ruin.
That's fine, I wouldn't invest in you, either.
Losing 30 million sounds like a much better (negative) indicator on whether to invest in someone than how many companies they started by 18.
>"I want Jobs and [Bill] Gates and [Mark] Zuckerberg and all of these guys to thank me for blazing some of [those trails], because it was much easier once there were several notable successes from [people] in their twenties," he says.
>But with that success came hubris.
No kidding.
>But with that success came hubris.
No kidding.
I love the tar cheatsheet in the background of the photo.
I was expecting his argument about how life is a really simulation, still a good read nonetheless.
Nolan Bushnell made terrible pizza. soapbox denied.
Best line of the article.
"I think part of the reason [Steve Jobs] smelled bad was 'cause he wouldn't necessarily go home every day."tar(1) flags as a blackboard prop, that's nice. I wouldn't consider them that complicated to warrant being a background image of such a nature, though.
The flags kind of look wrong, there is 'f' without an argument and piping a file inside? Maybe my tar memory is just fuzzy, it feels like https://xkcd.com/1168/
Complicated? Just easy to forget. Esoteric unimportant details.
I can sympathize. I have 4-5 languages I write once a month or so. Each has a different "if" syntax, and a different "for" syntax. Pretty soon I'm going to cave and write myself a little reference note like that.
(Yeah, yeah, I'm sure any real ninjapirate worth his salt can perfectly recall every syntax rule of every language he's ever written)
I can sympathize. I have 4-5 languages I write once a month or so. Each has a different "if" syntax, and a different "for" syntax. Pretty soon I'm going to cave and write myself a little reference note like that.
(Yeah, yeah, I'm sure any real ninjapirate worth his salt can perfectly recall every syntax rule of every language he's ever written)
I don't think I can program in any language any more. I seem to just instinctively copy the syntax of the code around where I'm typing. I never notice myself doing it because when I'm adding or modifying code, it never enters my mind. When I have to write new code I'm always in a dither - "Do I need parentheses here?", etc. It's very strange. I blame writing a lot of ruby and javascript code (jumping back and forth to coffeescript), whose syntax is often seemingly random :-P.
Slightly off topic, when I'm pair programming in ruby, I often say to the other person: "No you can't break the line there!" The other person rightly shows me that it works fine. Then they say, "Why did you think you can't do that?" My answer is always, "OMG... what kind of insane parser have they written to allow that to work".
Slightly off topic, when I'm pair programming in ruby, I often say to the other person: "No you can't break the line there!" The other person rightly shows me that it works fine. Then they say, "Why did you think you can't do that?" My answer is always, "OMG... what kind of insane parser have they written to allow that to work".
The closer two languages are the harder it is not to mess up with details like that.
That XKCD comic about tar(1) is more accurate than I'd like it to be.. I know off the top of my memory 'xvf' and 'cvzf' but that's about it.
Convenience: https://xkcd.com/1168/
I am surprise to find any article of the beebs on HN.
ITT: Twentysomethings guffaw about a man who has more success in his failures than they have experienced in their lives.
Jesus christ, really? That sounds like a hideous childhood to me. Is this what we're becoming, a race of people obsessed with capital and business and work?
Go play in the dirt and ride your bike, kid. Work when you're old.