All About The Games... Again
"I love to do things that are fun"
- Nolan Bushnell, VIDFEST, Vancouver June 15, 2006
Day two of VIDFEST is just getting underway. This morning all hands gathered at Performance Works on Granville Island to hear the valuable words from today's keynote speaker, Nolan Bushnell, CEO and Founder of uWink Inc..
Nolan is a legacy: Founder of Atari, PONG Creator, Pacman, Tetris, Chuck E. Cheese and that talking rat, just to name a few gaming successes for which he is responsible. Newsweek considers him as one of the 50 individuals who has changed the games industry worldwide.
Nolan credited the start of the Games business, essentially pre transistor, to physicist Willy Higginbotham and Steve Russell, an MIT Grad student who programmed Space War on a PDP-1. Space War completely mesmerized Nolan and he was sold. His passion was born.
He spoke about the process of innovation, and highlighted a few elements that he equated as The Quest, the Curses and the Holy Grails of Gaming:
Photo-realism and is it a good idea, empty demographics, PC security and copy protection, the politics and economics of sleaze, and the portable connected experience.
There is excitement of what tomorrow will look like for the average consumer. As we all struggle to know precisely where the internet is evolving, the next 20 years will see things like terabytes of memory at home, gigabytes of communication bandwidth, and permission-only access protecting your children from predators.
The powerful potential in Games is largely in the sports and education sectors. By moving game-play into the school systems, Nolan believes the workforce will inevitably become far more sophisticated.
Who will win in the end? In Nolan's opinion, sequels will start to fail, those with the best tools will win, and those with the new User Interfaces will succeed.
Innovation will trump all.
Wayne Clarkson from Telefilm Canada had the honours of introducing us to "the father" of video games. Thanks to Telefilm, events such as VIDFEST happen, and are done well.
The afternoon and tomorrow will see all participants moving from from panel to panel, taking in as much gaming, new technology and the future of digital media as possible. Check out the line-up and check back here for more live bogging.