Atari founder Nolan Bushnell on why life is 'a game'
bbc.com
bbc.com
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.
Some people fear we code up a Paperclip Maximizer, but it could be that we'll accidentally build one in pursuit of profits.
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.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/opinion/sunday/the-entrepr...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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+
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.
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/steve-wozniak-cried-jobs-kept-atari...
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'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 being, of course, the only moral determinant here. Even if you're using employees as a consumable, ea_spouse passim.
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?
Perhaps he's right, but maybe not in the way he expects.
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.
>But with that success came hubris.
No kidding.
"I think part of the reason [Steve Jobs] smelled bad was 'cause he wouldn't necessarily go home every day."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)
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".