social gaming

Nolan Bushnell Looks To Social Gaming, "Holodeck Come True"

Atari founder and industry forbear Nolan Bushnell discussed his "five-year ADD" during Wedbush Morgan's 6th annual management access conference, where he described his latest passions and shared thoughts on the industry's future. "Every five years, I've got to do something a little different," he said.

In addition to founding Atari, Bushnell also founded Chuck-e-Cheese's, and now he's into social gaming. His current project is UWink, a social gaming-focused restaurant chain with touch screen consoles at every table where users can not only order food and drink, but also play games together. UWink is set to open its second restaurant in Hollywood soon.

"Social games aren't sitting in boxer shorts in your basement," Bushnell said. "It's being out, having fun, being able to hi-five people around the table, and it's a bridge between traditional board games, which are highly social experiences in the home, and a video game. The idea is to create games in which the conversations among the people are as important as the gameplay itself."

One more thing on Bushnell's list of current projects? "Think of the holodeck come true," he said:

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social gaming

SCEE Plays Up Social Gaming At Gamer's Day 08

At Sony Europe's Gamers Day event, the company took care to emphasize the "social gaming" angle it's pursuing. The company focused on "games where players of all ages socialize through gaming," pointing out EyeToy products, puzzle titles and Buzz!: Quiz TV, where groups can play trivia games on a variety of topics over PlayStation Network. More »

multiplayer

The Case For Video Game Play Dates

Xbox Live is all fine and good, but there is no substitute for a couple of friends sacked out on the couch together, playing a video game together in person. The industry shift towards social gaming isn't something new - it's the return of something old - that feeling that older gamers like me used to get when standing around an arcade machine back in the day. Wired's Clive Thompson explores the trend in his latest column, which looks at how much a guy sitting next to you can change the gaming experience, using Army of Two as his example.

I hang out with other gamers all the time, but it's mostly in multiplayer online play, using headsets. It's social, sure. But as any psychologist will tell you, hanging out in real life allows for even richer styles of communication to emerge. In face-to-face mode, we're better at picking up the little nuances — frustration, glee, sarcasm, subvocalized ranting, body language — that build team cohesion, and allow us to game with a positively Vulcan level of mind meld.

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social gaming

Games Industry Affects Social Changes

The New York Times' Seth Schiesel has written an excellent article on the recent shift of gaming from a solitary or online practice to a more social affair, where friends and family gather and play together, and the way these changes have effected the companies that make the games. The social shift was completely necessary to bring gaming to the masses, and the companies that saw that early on saw great benefits, Nintendo's Wii being case in point. Just ask Phil Harrison, outgoing president of Sony's game studios, who has long been frustrated by his Japanese company's failure to change with the industry.

"It's a very interesting and frustrating thing for me to experience because I have been banging the drum about social gaming for a long time," he said. "And our Japanese colleagues said that there is no such thing as social gaming in Japan: 'People do not play games on the same sofa together in each other's homes. It will never happen.' And then out comes the Wii."

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