Recap: Games For Change Festival 2012

The video game industry catches flak from individuals claiming that games are a waste of time, or worse, a detriment to the socio-intellectual functioning of those who play them.  It's assuring to know that there is some semblance of luminaries in the field with researched findings to the contrary.  Many of these people convene annually for the Games For Change Festival, now in it's 9th year.  My attendance at the event (my first time) has come and gone, but what have developers, educators, and gamers taken from the discussions, forums, and demos?  I can only speak for myself, so allow me to recount the conference in daily breakdowns.  I'm not going to cover every single event that took place, and instead focus on the ones that left the greatest impression on me.  The events during the festival-proper on Tuesday and Wednesday were all livestreamed, so you can view archived video of most all of the major presentations given on those days.

Monday
The first day was really more of a "Day 0" since it was billed as a pre-festival summit.  Two groups sponsored simultaneous dockets spanning the entire day, each with specific focuses.  The Federal Games Working Group (FGWG) focused on intersections between the gaming industry and the government.  For what it's worth in the interest of disclosure, I am a member of this group through my Smithsonian affiliation.  However, I spent the majority of the summit day at the AMD Foundation's sessions on teaching game design to youth, which are more immediately relevant to my job as an educator.

The AMD session began with a tepid panel discussion featuring the day's lineup of presenters.  There was too much surface-deep talk about why games are great for education, and how that relates to their specific organization.  It was as if the introduction was the panel, which I understand the purpose of in concept, but it didn't lead anywhere interesting except for a couple decent audience questions that pointed to case study experiences.  Based on the crowd of attendees, I think it was safe to assume that everyone was already on board for using games in education, yet the panel was keen on reiterating this inherent understanding.  Perhaps this was information that one could take back to their traditionally entrenched institutions in hopes of better conveying more progressive stances on games in education.  Perhaps.

Next up was a walkthrough of Gamestar Mechanic, a game design learning tool that removes coding and focuses purely on the design process.  It's meant as a low-barrier introduction to these basics, targeted at the middle-school set.  The audience was prompted to play through a "level" for teachers that acted as a tutorial.  I found the tools pretty impressive in terms of making a side-scrolling or top-down game.  The tools for feedback and iteration were the most impressive aspect.  Classmates can play one another's games and leave comments on notes in-game ala Dark Souls.  When you  switch between play and edit modes on the fly, you can act on feedback notes immediately rather than having to switch to a disconnected editor.

GameSalad tools

The Activate! presentation in the afternoon similarly demoed a game design platform for classroom implementation, but this time it was GameSalad.  This was the presentation I was most excited for during the summits because I'm developing a workshop framework that uses that very program.  I first learned about GameSalad when it was mentioned in coverage of various game jams as a tool that anyone could learn to use.  Objectively speaking, the Activate! presentation may have leaned too heavily on GameSalad how-tos, but from my point of reference, it was exactly the sort of information I was looking for.  GameSalad definitely feels like a step up from Gamestar in terms of complexity, but even though it gets into code writing, you never have to actually "write" code, just use the drag/drop interface to place pre-programmed commands where you want them and adjust sliders accordingly.  Using some ready-made assets, audience members created a functional versions of Breakout in a mere half hour.  GameSalad seems like a powerful and empowering tool for high school students or even adults looking to dip their toes in the game design pool.

I jumped back over to the other summit at this point to catch up with some colleagues and shuttle off to attend a FGWG meet n' greet with some game designers who would be speaking during the festival the following two days.  I was pleased with my summit choices, but couldn't help wondering if I'd have enjoyed some of the FGWG talks more.  I read live tweets as they popped up during concurrent sessions, which seemed intriguing, though I appreciated how grounded and direct the AMD presentations were.  Having attended Digital Media Learning Conference (DML) earlier this year, I grew a little tired of the "big philosophical monologue then narrow case study" dynamic.  I looked back at the end of those days at DML with little to bring home and implement.  After the AMD summit, I definitely had pathways.

Tuesday
As festival Day 1 began, everyone filtered into an auditorium-style theater, tailor-made for presentations instead of the banquet halls and side rooms of the summits.  TED Talk alumnus Jane McGonigal held the opening keynote position and delivered an engaging presentation the covered self-help, design theory, neuroscience, and personal struggle.  The easiest reference for Jane McGonigal's game design work is Halo 2's I Love Bees alternate reality game/marketing campaign, where she was the community lead.  The driving focus of her speech was in alignment with the philosophy behind her latest game: SuperBetter, which supports players as they build real-world resilience.  McGonigal spoke of an incident where she suffered severe head trauma and was faced with a situation that seemed to present her with "no reason to live."  In order to help her get through day-to-day existence, she began to gamify her life.  She would set challenges for herself that would take concentrated effort, but could realistically be achieved, and used this tactic as a significant contribution to her recovery.  McGonigal wants SuperBetter to be a game where players can improve themselves in similar ways, but without having to undergo trauma.  I don't know all of the technical details about how you're supposed to "play" the game, but the design philosophy was touching and impactful, leaving me with a desire to explore SuperBetter further at some point.

Before lunch, Cow Clicker creator Ian Bogost took the stage to discuss games as tools for journalism.  "Newsgames," as he dubbed them, are games that can be played to consume news stories in a different way than other forms of media.  Bogost detailed the history of the relationship between traditional news media and games, and particularly how the downfall of newspapers and emergence of Internet and TV news has squandered the most all intersections of games and news.  Bogost is part of a team creating a newsgame tool called Game-O-Matic that allows users to almost instantly create a game based around a news story.  The instantaneous element is important since game design normally takes the effort of a small team and multiple hours, and news obviously changes much more quickly.  Newsgames need to be more akin to photojournalism in their accessibility and promptness.

The Game-O-Matic presents you with a blank slate where you can make a word-web of nouns and attach them together with verb-laden arrows.  The tool only provides a preset list of verbs, but through a little interpretive reasoning, you should be able to find something that will generate the desired behavior.  Once this is setup, you simply click a big red "create" button and poof, your newsgame has a ruleset and is ready to go.  Sample games were generated using Mayor Michael Bloomberg, soda, and obesity as the elements, to amusing results.  By default the insta-games just use colored dots with text labels, but you can sub in icons as you wish.  Gameplay options appeared simple, consisting of mechanics that have been around  for a long time like "collect all of something," or "exit the screen to the right," but there could be obstacles depending on how complex you make the relationships between objects.  Does this lend Game-O-Matic particularly well to handling dourly serious news content?  Probably not, but it seems adept at just about any subject you can shake an editorial cartoon at.

Sweatshop screenshot

A round of game design case studies was offered in the afternoon, highlighting titles that deliberately seek to be agents of change, each in their own way.  The two that stuck out the most to me were both British in origin: Sweatshop and The End.  Sweatshop is a tower defense-style game where you have to put together consumer products on an assembly line.  The game gets increasingly complex as different workers specialize in different steps of the process and you must keep them hydrated and productive, taking on the role of floor manager.  The End is a puzzle platformer that borrows symbolism from various religious traditions in an effort to inform the player about these belief systems.  As the name implies, there's a particular focus on the afterlife, and the game has gridded out some historical figures so that depending on how you answer certain questions posed by "boss" characters, you are shown to be leaning closer to, say, Churchill or Einstein.

Having played, but not completed either of these games, I can't say anything with absolute conclusion, but they both do an excellent job of showing effective socially conscious game design, and also bringing to light where these kinds of games can fall short.  Sweatshop is stylish, witty, and quite fun to play, but I could see the name and subject matter putting people off outright.  The End provides an interesting service in its alignment of like-minded historical figures, but I found the platforming gamelplay to be rather rote, even if it did look pretty.  Both games also pop up with blocks of text after completing levels that inform you of certain real-world implications or examples of how the game reflects things outside of itself.  I imagine the vast majority of players just skip these over, seeing as their tone seems to be coming from outside the game, even if they put it in a word bubble of a recognizable character.  I'd be interested to read about the measurable results of these games since they seem both difficult to quantify and boldly ambitious with their goals.

After a day-closing keynote from Nolan Bushnell, everyone sauntered over to a nearby bar for the opening night party featuring free PBRs and a few Kinect games (nothing I hadn't seen before: Dance Central, Sesame Street, and Happy Action Theater).  The casual atmosphere and light socializing was a pleasant cap on a full day of sitting in an auditorium listening to people talk while furiously rapping on my iPad with my fingertips.

Wednesday
ASU professor James Paul Gee kicked off the final festival day with a charge for the development of what he termed "Big 'G' Games."  This charge calls for the creation of games that truly foster learning by both existing as pieces of software, but also connecting players with real-world people and spaces.  Gee claims that to have a good Game, you'll need to provide or facilitate an affinity space (somewhere for people to commune, discuss, problem solve, and innovate) and also follow about 20 or so principles that he went on to detail with the rest of his talk.  One of the big points was to focus on not just cognitive intelligence, but also emotional and social intelligences.  This was a rallying point for Gee against traditional education systems, which he sees as offering excruciatingly narrow pathways for growth, and I believe he'd argue that growth to be unsupportive of all three realms of intelligence.

"Passion" was a topic that recurringly surfaced during Gee's talk as well.  For a game to be a Game, it, like all good art, should inspire passion within those who choose to engage with it.  He cited modding communities as people who've developed passion for a game and seek to change it for the better in some way.  This behavior is not by coincidence, but rather the tools have been laid out by designers for willing individuals to pick them up and use them.  In cases like this, the original designers' influence over the game will at some point become obsolete, and the collective intelligence of players will push the game into new territories.  As designers, the proposition of relinquishing so much control over your creation may be scary, but crafting a Game that encourages this to happen actually presents much bolder and more dynamic learning opportunities for players.

Way screenshot

One of the talks that I was most looking forward to was Chris Bell's, who has gained a great deal attention for his work on Journey, and whose previous game, Way, was nominated for a number of awards at Games For Change this year and ended up taking GOTY honors.  I hadn't seen Bell's GDC speech, which this one supposedly borrowed from quite a bit, so I was going in fresh.  His talk was about friendship, and how games can seek to bring people together as successfully as they can incite competition (I don't think he'd want to imply that the two are opposites though).  Bell recounted a touching story that he claims inspired him not just to create innovative game mechanics, but also think differently about basic communication systems that humans use to interact with one another.  In brief, he found himself very lost in a gigantic fish market in Japan and in need of returning back to his bus in 5 minutes.  He had no map, no phone service, and no conversational command of the Japanese language.  Bell did have a photo of the shrine where the bus was supposed to be and knew how to say "excuse me," but that was it.  An older woman heard him, recognized his look of panic, took his hand and ran with him to the shrine where the bus was, arriving just in time for Bell to board.

Bell spoke of how this incident stuck with him, and the influence of that day in the fish market is explicitly evident in both Way and Journey.  More features doesn't necessarily equal better features.  This isn't an argument about prioritizing resources, though that one could be made, but rather that meta-game and communication mechanics are often taken for granted, as if there's one path that can be taken towards optimal systems.  With this standard in place, it's easy to judge your feature set's range and project resources accordingly, but you'd also be failing to acknowledge all of the options.  Both Journey and Way use what have been deemed "limited" communication systems for player interaction, but Bell argues that this actually provides a more stable groundwork for potential friendships to blossom with strangers than the ways online games primarily use headsets and implement player-to-player dialogue.  I was able to interpret a lot of these intentions on the part of Bell by simply playing the games he's worked on, but it was that story of the older Japanese woman in the fish market that really surprised me and made me hopeful for the future of the medium, hearing that leading game designers are taking inspiration from those kinds of experiences.

Having gone to school for art, I kind of relish opportunities to participate in formal critique sessions.  While I didn't get to go on stage or anything, I did get to witness a Demo Spotlight (not archived) wherein four developers put themselves up on the chopping block in front of an auditorium filled with onlookers, while the likes of Kellee Santiago, Dan White, and the Executive Director of Zynga's philanthropic arm, asked questions, offered advice, and handed out critique.  It seemed kind of scary for some of the developers whose projects were either not that far along or required some convincing to get the panel on board.  One game was Zombie Yoga for Kinect, which just by the title is a "strike 3, you're out" kind of situation for me.  It seemed like the Zombie Yoga team's main goal was to make a game that adds visuals to illustrate what the body/mind is doing with different yoga poses.  I don't know anything about yoga, and I don't want to, but the game showed in a way that made even that baseline concept come off as a target that was not exactly being hit.  I imagine the Demo Spotlight was more helpful for those teams than ones that have their packages nearly together.  An iPad game called Popchilla's World, a digital learning tool for autistic children, seemed like a solid, well-conceived package.  Though, since special needs learning is such a specific realm of education, it seemed difficult for the panel to conjure questions of real critique.  I get a bit of a nostalgic trip out of seeing those kinds of honest discussions happen though, so I was pleasantly surprised by their inclusion in the festival.

By Tuesday evening, I'd seen dozens of lectures, played a handful of unique indie games, and gotten to hang out with some pretty smart people.  I love to hear about how the world of video games is expanding beyond the basic confines of human-computer interfaces, and in particular those efforts that are seeking to improve the world we have.  We know that making successful games is difficult, and that making games that instigate social change is equally, if not more difficult, so imagine how tough it is to make one that does both.  It's a daunting task to consider, but conferences like Games For Change do their part to retain a sense of optimism that such goals are achievable.

Behold! The Art of Video Games

This past weekend the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) opened The Art of Video Games: a history-spanning account of the life of the medium.  It's a big coming out party for games-as-art champions who get to see the games they love stand in the limelight on a national stage.  The show was put together with great care and respect by guest curator Chris Melissinos, but perhaps the most significant thing about The Art of Video Games is that it exists at all.

The title of the exhibition is so purely descriptive it seems like it should be the subtitle to something written in leetspeak.  I imagine the reasons for such a bland header are multifold.  There's a wide audience of museum goers who know nothing about games and the straightforward title lets them know what they're in for.  It plays it safe, which could be used as a descriptor of the entire show.  It isn't surprising that SAAM would want to avoid controversy, especially in the wake of the hot water their housemate, the National Portrait Gallery, found themselves in with their Hide/Seek exhibition.  Also, the Smithsonian can be a stuffy place, and The Art of Video Games is a sign of goodwill on the part of games advocates who are willing to keep the crazy in the box in exchange for a solid dose of recognition.

3-channel video showing gamers' faces as they play

The exhibition consists of three rooms: a "visual art of games" display, a hands-on arcade space, and an archival console timeline.  Aside from the hilarious video footage of gamers' faces as they play, the initial room seems geared towards showing the visual appeal and traditional craft of game aesthetics.  Concept art and storyboards are installed salon-style, and a 5-channel display shows the graphical leaps in video games hardware over the past few decades.  I imagine the first room gives non-gamers something to latch onto that's a bit more familiar for an art museum.

Moving forward, visitors enter a wide open space with a handful of large projected games to play, each contained within a giant half-cylinder "arcade cabinet."  The whole room is aglow in purple, blue, and black stenciled lights, offering an aesthetic that's very roller rink/lazer tag arena.  During the opening weekend there were lines for the multi-generationally recognizable Pac-Man and Super Mario Bros.  People were playing Myst and The Secret of Monkey Island too, but the nature of those adventure titles made them more suitable for a less crowded setting.  Along with Flower, these are the only playable games in the exhibition.

A giant playable version of the original Pac-Man

The third space, the console timeline, seems like the centerpiece of the show.  In this room, again bathed in purple, vertical structures display video game consoles individually behind glass and pair them with four games each.  The games are divided evenly into Action, Target, Adventure, and Tactics categories, offering a better glance at genre evolutions than necessarily the best or most important games on a particular system.  Each tower has a button per game that plays a video with voiceover describing why the game is of significance and additional contextual details.  Unfortunately, some of the game selections feel like an unnecessary stretch to prove their worth.  The video for TRON: Maze-Atron even admits that the game wasn't very good, yet, here it is.  It may have been a noble effort to democratize the selection process, but it's difficult to see that as a plus given some of the resulting picks; I'm looking at you Worms Armageddon.

It's frustrating to see an exhibition of video games both spread itself too thin and miss essential pieces at the same time, but The Art of Video Games does just that.  Everyone could have their list of impossible-to-satisfy omissions, but I find it hard to stand behind the absence of all fighting games and, by extension, arcades.  On the other end of the spectrum, the broad survey of games is rooted in understanding chronological history more than communicating a clear argument for why we should view games as artworks.  Perhaps "games are art" is the inherent assumption, given the context of the exhibition in an art museum, but I was hoping for a little more intellectual rumination on the subject.

Video game history on display in chronological order

I love video games, but I realize this show is only partially meant for me.  I don't go into an art exhibition expecting to adore every piece, but I do need to find resonance in the core conceits of the artists and curators who bring everything together.  This is a sentiment that The Art of Video Games ultimately achieves.   Melissinos has painted a history of games that may not be a mirror reflection of actual events, but it is a narrative that makes sense, and is actually digestible.  The show is a foot in the door for the medium that will hopefully lead to increasingly daring efforts in the future.

The opening of The Art of Video Games was supplemented by talks and panel discussions as part of Gamefest, covered here previously.

Recap: Gamefest Day 2

Opening this weekend at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) is the Art of Video Games exhibition, curated by Chris Melissinos.  I'll be taking a deeper look at the show itself soon, but in the meantime, SAAM has been putting on a series of events they're calling Gamefest that lasts all weekend.  For Saturday this consisted of a couple lectures, live music and games, and a film screening (The King of Kong).  I'll focus on the two auditorium discussions of the day.

A Conversation with Hideo Kojima

I wasn't able to physically attend this talk since tickets were claimed in advance and the line that showed up for standby was pretty huge.  Luckily it's available to view online, which is the version I'll just briefly touch on.

I don't think "conversation" was really the correct term to describe the Kojima event, since it was really just the Japanese developer answering Melissinos' questions through a translator for an hour.  It's difficult to overcome language barriers in these kinds of situations, and as such, it's best to go into a talk like this with metered expectations.   Still, it's cool to see Hideo Kojima in person.  I love his games and his sense of style.

Topics ranged from original inspirations, to qualities of great game designers, to the difference between games and films.  There was nothing super surprising, especially for audience members who've been following Kojima and/or Metal Gear for a long time.  He wouldn't reveal anything about his next projects except to say that he's working on "something," and that the player will be more in control of the narrative pacing in contrast to the Metal Gear Solid series.  

There was no mention of Transfarring.

It’s All in the Design with Robin Hunicke

Indie studio thatgamecompany has been enjoying quite a bit of limelight at the Art of Video Games.  Producer Robin Hunicke is a producer who worked on their latest title, Journey.  Before that she was with EA for Sims 2, My Sims, and Boom Blox.  She spoke about what she sees as the core mechanics of game design, and how those points apply to people lives outside of games.

Hunicke broke her design goals down into 4 categories: Exploration, Expression, Experimentation, and Experience.  She related these to various points in her game development career, making sure to note how not only are these goals for what a game should play like, but also how the development process should operate.  She sees great leadership coming from someone who acts as a "force multiplier."  This would be an individual who knows how to ask the right questions of their team, and trusts them to answer those questions by doing great work.  The leader can't be an overlord.  She recognized Steven Spielberg, the create force behind Boom Blox, as an individual who is a master of this force multiplier technique.

Knowing that her 4 design goals make for a satisfying work environment, it makes sense that creating content that performs extraordinarily in those categories would make for rewarding game experiences.  They aren't just game experiences though, since game experiences are increasingly part of our life experiences.  It makes sense to make the two more successfully intertwine, meaning individuals can aspire to better meet those design goals n both virtual and real-world fronts.

Development on Journey was also discussed in the context of the 4 design goals.  Hunicke explained that the team had at one point built a variety of puzzles that required the two people playing the game to work together; think ladder lowering, dual switch pressing, and the like.  This was found to be incredibly stifling to the openness of the design concept and was ultimately scrapped.  It felt too much like you're completing a test instead of actually playing around in the world.  Those 4 design goals are really 4 different factors of play that, once combined, can make for an immersive experience.

Recap: Gamefest Day 1

Opening this weekend at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) is the Art of Video Games exhibition, curated by Chris Melissinos.  I'll be taking a deeper look at the show itself soon, but in the meantime, SAAM has been putting on a series of events they're calling Gamefest that lasts all weekend.  For Friday this consisted of a couple panel discussions, a lecture, and a film screening (TRON).  I was able to attend all of the talky-talk events.

The Evolution of Video Games: Pioneers
Panelists (left to right): Chris Melissinos, Mike Mika, Keith Robinson, Rand Miller, and Don Daglow

First up to bat was a series of industry vets who weren't above swapping a few war stories, but offer plenty of first-hand knowledge from the dawn of the medium.  Honestly though, the pre-crash era of games is the one I'm least familiar with, so I was happy to hear about the processing power equivalents of walking 13 miles to school in the snow.  I had no idea that games were being programmed prior to the notion of the live monitor interface.  They printed out on paper!  That might have been the most stirring factoid I heard all day.

Much discussion was framed around the forward evolutions in console generations, and how new sets of constraints are introduced in each cycle.  Daglow made the association that when a new piece of hardware was introduced, it was as if someone turned off the lights in your living room, rearranged all the furniture, and left you to feel around for familiar textures.  All of the panelists echoed the notion that design constraints imposed by limited hardware may have presented significant challenges, but ultimately they were a boon to focusing creativity and keeping their minds from running totally wild.

Mika parleyed these sentiments into discussing the challenges of true emulation and homage, specifically citing his work on faux NES title Dark Void Zero.  I couldn't help but think about certain rock bands who only play with vintage gear to achieve specific classic sounds.  Others mentioned how the lack of modern paddle controls makes it very difficult for new players to understand what made a game like Warlords so much fun.

The discussion was moderated by exhibition curator Chris Melissinos who retained a positively giddy tone throughout.  He was eager to share entertaining, personal stories from his own life in between panelist prompts.  The tone of the conversations were mostly feel-good, without the usual disdain for nostalgia that accompanies art criticism.  This wasn't really the venue for that anyway.  The Pioneers group shed light on some intriguing moments in history and successfully drew parallels between the industry issues of 40 years ago and those of today.

The Evolution of Video Games: The Future
Panelists (left to right): Chris Melissinos, Mark DeLoura, Paul Barnett, Ken Levine, and Kellee Santiago

While the Pioneers panel focused on how we got to the present, the Future panel was filled with speculation about where we go next and attempts to define where in fact we currently are.  As a result there was actually some debate among the group.

Discussion sparked when Barnett suggested the idea of individualized "golden ages" for gamers.  The basic idea is that there's a range of years in your life when you are most absorbed in playing games, and most susceptible to that saturation having a significant role in your development as a person.  I don't know if that's true across the board, but definitively within certain genres and franchises.  Is there really a need to play any version of Mario Kart other than the one you originally fell in love with?  Maybe, but I doubt you'll like it as much.  Santiago argued that the increased diversity in the gaming community has led plenty of individuals to discover and understand games in more varied stages of life.

Diversity was actually a point of commonality among the panel; diversity among developer personnel, styles of games, funding models, audiences, and more.  One question from the audience spoke ill of "pretentious indie games" which Santiago later jokingly admitted to producing.  After a string of don't-like-it-don't-play-it responses, Levine smartly piped up and reassured the audience member that developers pull from a wide variety of games and other media for inspiration, and that it's likely that "hardcore game" (my quotation marks, not Levine's) developers will play something like Dear Esther and incorporate and translate some of those ideas into their future titles.  On the subject of borrowing ideas from other people's work, Barnett chimed in with a Monty Python quote for inspiration that went something like "All of my best ideas are bad ideas that someone misheard and made a good idea from."

Likewise with the notions of teamwork, sharing, and open communication being key elements of a successful development studio being touted, only DeLoura sidled with the remark that there's something significant and worthwhile to the singular vision of an artist, seen through from beginning to end.  As an artist, I was personally glad someone on the panel expressed that sentiment.  I'm all for teamwork, but for certain projects there are people who need to control everything in service of a perspective that only they can offer.  DeLoura offered Jonathan Blow's Braid as an example.

I thought we might be treated to more talk about the hot-off-the-presses Journey or the looming Bioshock Infinite, but a lot of the concepts being touched on were more "big picture" items.  This was for the best since it kept the discussions driven in directions that all of the panelists could contribute their expertise to.  I left the panel feeling like I'd actually seen some genuine intellectual discussion happen, which is what I was hoping for.  I've watched video of Levine speaking at GDC about the potential for narrative in games and read Santiago's writing about thatgamecompany's aspirations, so I went in with high hopes, which were mostly fulfilled.

Nolan Bushnell: Video Games in Retrospect

Having never seen Bushnell speak in person before, I only had the title of his lecture to draw from.  Would this be an encyclopedic history lesson?  An intimate trip down memory lane?  Turns out it was a little of both with generous helpings of kookiness and comic relief, and a general sense of wide-eyed amazement at what new generations of game makers are creating based on frameworks he helped invent.

Much like the Pioneers panel, there were some look-how-big-computers-were stuff, but I was most interested in Bushnell the businessman since he came off as particularly shrewd.  He pointed out that his company, Atari, had developed Pong, but that game had been ripped off by so many other companies that the majority of Pong machines weren't actually sold by Atari.  They counteracted this by faking the labels on the boards that they manufactured so that when competitors would look at them for copies, they'd end up putting things in the wrong places, and the boards wouldn't work at all.  They supposedly drove most all of their non-conglomerate copycats out of business with this strategy.

That's the other thing about Bushnell: he likes legendary stories, and he's certainly billed as one.  Are some of these stories myths?  We have to take his word for it I suppose, since at least the results of his endeavors are on record as facts.  I hadn't questioned anything until he mentioned the ET cartridge debacle and rumor of a desert burial repository for the unwanted titles.  I always had fun telling that story to non-gamer friends, but I don't know that I really believed it was anything but a tall tale.  On the other hand, Bushnell freely admits they had to sell Atari-Japan to Namco due to defying numerous rules and regulations out of ignorance of the country's bylaws, so why not just hop on for the ride if he's willing to go that far.

The talk wrapped up with a "ref" from Twin Galaxies and high-score king Billy Mitchell trotting out a giant video game trading card of Bushnell as an honorary award.  There was a chumminess between them and a heartfelt recognition that having an exhibition of video games in a national art museum is a truly significant step for the form.  They seemed to relish it so much that they burned right through Q/A time, which meant it dragged a bit, but in the context of this symbolic achievement, I understand wanting to hold onto that moment as long as possible.