Nolan Bushnell, baseless accusations, and placating bad journalism.

One of The forefather of gaming

It's been a tough few months for my wife and I. Having a child is both her dream and something I also wanted, and now, as she lays in the hospital bed next to me as I type this out in a dimly lit room it's starting to click that we are close to one of life's greatest accomplishments.  For you, out there being on the precipice of becoming a new parent may not be an accomplishment you may want for yourself, but you may find accomplishment in using your talents to better your quality of life or the industry you may be working in. Or perhaps you may want to start a new industry altogether?



To Nolan Bushnell, he was - still is a man trying to ignite new industries and explore new possibilities. Nolan got his start  as an Electrical Engineer grad  working with Ted Dabney to create a prototype of their take on the popular microcomputer/mainframe computer game "Spacewar!"(1967). Bushnell took up jobs servicing broken pinball machines to finance the creation of what would eventually become Computer Space, a game that while didn't overtake the popularity of Spacewar! still netted sales exceeding $3 million dollars and the drive to want to be successful. Nolan would eventually go on to observe the Magnavox Odyssey demo in an event in Burlinggame California and be inspired to improve upon it's design, adding a scoring system and sound.  Eventually settling on the name PONG, he and Allan Alcorn produced arcade machines under his newly named company "Atari" which of course is taken from the Japanese strategy board game, GO. 

Funny how GO commonly comes up in the history of video games -  The late Hiroshi Yamauchi played GO regularly, and this brought him both insight in how to run his company as well as introducing opportunities and forging friendships. Henk Rogers, initially came to Yamauchi  and Nintendo with a concept for a Famicom version of GO  and eventually developed both a friendship and a GO rivalry with Hiroshi, eventually with his own company, Bullet -Proof Software helped the company to seal the deal with Alexy Pajitnov to secure the rights to Tetris on the Gameboy.

Back on topic,  Bushnell has been responsible for both building Atari into an industry powerhouse, and creating the themed restaurant chain  Chuck E. Cheese (which blew my young mind when I discovered the E stands for "Entertainment". ).  Recently In an interview with gaming podcast, Gamertag Radio, Nolan had been exploring possibilities with VR and talking positively about the state of the industry. Listening to the interview personally he seemed not only inspiring but very full of possibilities for the future, which is something I found to be endearing and enlightening. Which is why it irritates me to see the sudden attack on not only his legacy, but the history of video games by what can only be described as "cultural vultures" who can't even be bothered to actually accomplish anything on their own.

The glory days of Atari

               

The Game Developers Conference in all of it's delusional glory decided in a move to force it's own #MeToo moment of sorts - Rolling Stone reports that  the GDC nominating commission had to reexamine giving Bushnell the "Pioneer award" For his accomplishments following allegations that have surfaced over what seems to be another case of placing current day sensibilities ( which is laughable) on time periods that weren't as cancerous. Rolling Stone apparently has the story featuring the following...

Some game developers and academics are protesting Bushnell's nomination using the Twitter hashtag #notnolan. They want to know why GDC organizers UBM are "rewarding" a person whose past inappropriate behavior and are calling the timing of the award "tone deaf" in the wake of the massive #MeToo movement. 

When you look at that hashtag, you don't really see any solid allegations, only a bunch of would-be wannabes trying to make themselves look more important than they really are, as well as a few people "shitposting" (or having fun while posting information disproving these "allegations"). So immediately, you see both the ineptitude of the media covering this non-troversy, as well as the willingness to put down people who actually did something for the industry for the sake of a few dyed haired nobodies to try to bank off of an industry icon for the sake of extending their fifteen minutes just a teensy bit longer...

"While other industries are distancing themselves from the abusive and sexist behaviors of powerful men, GDC is giving a pioneer award to one of them," Worcester Polytechnic Institute assistant professor Gillian Smith wrote on twitter. "I only hope @ubm reverses their decision to honor Nolan Bushnell, whose sexually harassing behavior is well documented."

While other industries are distancing themselves from claims of abuse, the gaming industry which actually is historically meritocratic towards both sexes seems to have less of a problem than the rest of the Movie and Entertainment industry. This is of course my own rewriting of that statement in the sake of making it less sensationalist and more truthful.

By the by, who exactly is Gillian Smith, you may be asking? Well let's take a gander. Well, according to this bio, Smith is a former assistant professor in Art Design and current assistant professor in computer science and interactive media & game development at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Of course, as I expected, this seems to have popped up at the bottom of that bio...

With regard to feminism and social justice, I am interested in how AI systems, especially generative systems, embed politics and represent diversity through their design. I also have some projects that involve creating technological interventions for social justice issues.

Notice it's never really about being interested in things such as AI systems, generative systems and Computer science works, and how it can be applied in game design for the sake of such things, it's always politically motivated, always ideologically based, and always alway always about that mythical phrase that seems to have deviated far away from it's original meaning.. "diversity"

Diversity isn't about outright witch hunting people with falsified information in some play to make yourselves relevant. If that's the case then that glass house will come down in shards once your little skeletons come out of their respective closets; because as the old adage goes - what goes around comes around! With that, lets see what else this thing that passes for journalism in 2018 has to say...

All three awards announced today - the Lifetime Achievement, Ambassador and Pioneer awards - are chosen through a combination of the ICAN (International Choice Awards Network) voters and the Game Developers Choice Awards Advisory Committee, which includes notable game industry leaders such as Doug Lombardi (Valve), Angie Smets (Guerrilla Games), Julien Merceron (Bandai Namco Games) and Kiki Wolfkill (343 Industries), according to the GDC.

I'm not really a fan of award shows, myself; I find them to be glorified back patting sessions, and just really too much about the "flavor of the month" and not enough about the contributions and how they ultimately push the industry foreward (You know, like actual progress...). However I also feel that if anyone does deserve an award for their accomplishments, it would definitely be Nolan, and that's not because he followed me on twitter for explaining the historical context of the rise of his company.  Quite the contrary. I'm of the strong belief that historical relevance isn't something you can attain in the present. In a span of nearly sixty years this man paved the way for both arcade culture, and how we look at modern consoles, That is really nothing to scoff at, and while the current hopefuls have influenced the industry in their own ways, it's difficult to say if that influence will in fact be felt to the capacity that Bushnell's accomplishments have.

Now that's not me minimizing accomplishments, but it is acknowledging those who truly have earned and deserve their prestige - or as people used to call it. Respect.

Brianna Wu, a game developer currently running for the U.S. House of Representatives in Massachusetts' 8th congressional district, also weighed in on Bushnell's past on social media today. She spoke to Glixel over the phone and said she thinks he does deserve recognition – just not right now. 

"Nolan Bushnell is clearly a deeply important person in video game history," she said. "He deserves to be honored for a lifetime achievement award without question. But in the year that the #MeToo movement is going on and we're having a reckoning about what women face in the workplace? It just seems really tone deaf by GDC." 

"There are so many women in our video game industry whose achievements have just gone unheralded," she added. "So, I think what they should do is take a closer look at some of the women that have really contributed to our industry and honor them instead this year."

Witness the intelligence here, rivaling that of  Professor Moriarty in terms of tactical genius...

Calling Wu a game developer is giving far too much credit, but to her credit at least she did sort of finish one game... kind of....

In saying that, however Wu could have easily had more time to develop the one butchered excuse of a game had she actually put time and effort into her product instead of spending time trying to drum up controversy to gain notoriety. Things like sending yourself harassment, and then forgetting to sign out of your steam greenlight account, or blaming a consumer led revolt for just about every event that has ever happened in the media. Wu currently is trying to become a member of the Mass. House of Representatives, and yet the campaign for that seems peppered with the most bizarre commercials and logical leaps of mental gymnastics; even going so far to say that dropping rocks off of the moon will cause nuclear disasters on earth.. and, yes I'm not using hyperbole!! 

Take note, ladies. if you want to move into development these are the women to aspire to be...

Saying there are so many women who have accomplishments that have gone unheralded, is interesting considering that instead of actually working to uncover those accomplishments, or actually heralding them, yourself, you choose to try to throw dirt on the names of the men who helped build this industry. Even the Game Awards recognized Carol Shaw for her accomplishments in developing popular River Raid and Motherboard even did an biography on Donna Bailey for her work on Centipede, but I would surmise this has more to do with the fact that you can't even name any of these unsung female programmers off the top of your head, and I would wage a fair amount of coin to prove my hypothesis correct.

Your genitalia and skin tone mean nothing compared to your willingness to work and the ruthless pursuit of perfecting skill

It's funny that this whole ordeal seems to go right back to the one place where most information and half-truths seem to stem. A place where Not even two weeks ago we uncovered that it's own features editor was hanging out with someone they broke a story on without disclosure. Good ole' Kotaku.

I want to take a moment to hip you in on a few things when writing about people. If you're planning on say drumming up controversy on someone, the best way to do this is to basically use quotes from other articles, books, or media out of context. the lack of said context can easily be used to frame the statement in any way you like; Say you have an agenda to push like say you want to take an industry icon such as Nolan Bushnell and frame him into the #metoo controversy as a sexist creep who harasses all the women in the office, The best way to go about this is to take a past comment and erase any context from it and post it's rawest form in your article.

behold!

Al Alcorn described in 2001 book The Ultimate History of Video Games: “We had a board meeting in his tub. Nolan was saying how much money we were going to be worth, all these millions, and I thought to myself, ‘I’ll believe this when I see it.’ Nolan needed some papers and documents so he called his office and said, ‘Have Miss so and so bring them up.’ We were in this tub [when she arrived], so he proceeded to try to get her in the tub during the board meeting.” (In The Ultimate History of Video Games, Bushnell says that “It’s actually, I think, a very interesting documentable piece of society that most of us played around. I mean this is the late 1960s, early 1970s.”)

 I'll show the full quote taken from The Ultimate history of video games.

- I remember this board meeting... Nolan lived in Los Gatos in a very nice house on the hilltop with a hot tub out back. we had a board meeting in his tub. Nolan was saying how much money we were going to be worth, all these millions, and I thought to myself, "I'll believe this when I see it." 

Nolan needed some papers and documents so he called up his office and said "Have Miss so-and-so bring them up." We were in this tub (when she arrived), so he proceeded to try to get her in the tub during the board meeting. Nolan's attorney was miffed (because) we got his papers wet. He was not in the hot tub and he was not amused by any of this. that was the sort of fun we had.  - Al Alcorn

So going off of the full quote it's assumed she got into the tub and actually they all had fun during the meeting with the exception of the attorney, who had to figure out what to do with the wet paperwork.

There are additional comments that can be traced back to their original media and probably expanded on as well, but that's not going to bring those juicy clicks, now is it?

Of course this eventually leads to Nolan having to make a response, and it seems to be a pretty sterile statement. On second look it's pretty subtle in giving the GDC just enough rope to hang itself with it's own virtue signaling bull. I'll get to why that is, in a second.

“I applaud the GDC for ensuring that their institution reflects what is right, specifically with regards to how people should be treated in the workplace. And if that means an award is the price I have to pay personally so the whole industry may be more aware and sensitive to these issues, I applaud that, too. If my personal actions or the actions of anyone who ever worked with me offended or caused pain to anyone at our companies, then I apologize without reservation.”

Of course when you're trying to virtue signal and set up an air of sexual harassment that hardly exists in an industry that was and still is heavily meritocratic, you probably should be careful not to catch the ire of women who worked in the industry at the time period you're trying to villify, because you may just find yourself dining on a meal of your own foot.

Former Atari employees Elaine Shirley and Loni Reeder  had this to say about this make-believe ordeal...  Let's take a look at Elaine's statement, on the Facebook group.

“I worked for Atari from 73-99. I was there during the Nolan era.. It was the 70’s, we had fun. To my knowledge, no one ever did anything they did not want to do. At Atari, there was NO hostile work environment. The GDC should ask the women that actually worked there during that time. I support Nolan getting the award. Geez, next they will be pulling awards given to the Beatles, Led Zeppelin and the WHO.. It was a different time.”

Loni Reeder, however has much more to say on the situation than just discussing the time period.

                       

Perhaps the GDC will right this wrong, or maybe not. It's pretty clear that they're just worried about maintaining the values of today and showing how great "current year +4"is for women rather than actually focusing on a time where female empowerment actually had begun to see women in the same positions as men and making the same accomplishments.



 In "Current year" logic, placing plastic domes on an arcade game as a means to create a "female game" because you jokingly felt that joysticks were phallic is detrimental to women.  Perhaps in about thirty years from now people will look back at the missteps of the GDC and all these virtue signaling, dyed haired problem children, and point them out to be just as big a detriment to the industry at large, as we see them, today. I'm certainly sure that we'll remember Bushnell, Atari and it's accomplishments further into the future than we would ever remember the GDC, Kotaku or  it's cavalcade of  dyed haired, problem glasses wearing, problem faced ne'er do wells.

- I'll see you next Bossfight!