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Atari founder Nolan Bushnell on why life is 'a game'

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Re: Atari founder Nolan Bushnell on why life is 'a game'

#31

Post by mikekchar »

sliverstorm wrote: post #19
vezzy-fnord wrote: post #3

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.

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 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".

Re: Atari founder Nolan Bushnell on why life is 'a game'

#32

Post by superuser2 »

michaelkeenan wrote: post #29
DigitalSea wrote: post #13

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 pre…

> 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 th…

These young men were employees, not owners.

Re: Atari founder Nolan Bushnell on why life is 'a game'

#33

Post by dbpokorny »

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?

Re: Atari founder Nolan Bushnell on why life is 'a game'

#34

Post by mattlutze »

bbcbasic wrote: post #25
1stop wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well at least with the latter it implies a third problem that could be very broad and cover everything ;-)

There is only one hard problem in computer science. Finding a cheap but very talented software developer :-)

The hard problem is keeping that unicorn after you've found them... ;-)

Re: Atari founder Nolan Bushnell on why life is 'a game'

#35

Post by TeMPOraL »

eru wrote: post #30
jen729w wrote: post #6

>"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. 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.

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.

Re: Atari founder Nolan Bushnell on why life is 'a game'

#36

Post by TeMPOraL »

johnchristopher wrote: post #23
gexla wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> 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…

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.

Re: Atari founder Nolan Bushnell on why life is 'a game'

#38

Post by abides006 »

jen729w wrote: post #6

>"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. 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.

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.

Re: Atari founder Nolan Bushnell on why life is 'a game'

#39

Post by pjc50 »

michaelkeenan wrote: post #29
DigitalSea wrote: post #13

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 pre…

> 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 th…

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.

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