IDEAS: We live now in a world where people often are sitting alone in a room playing something. Very different from the Atari philosophy, which, to me, was about games as a social experience. The games were always better with two players.
MONTFORT: I wouldn’t want to argue that the Atari way was better. But it has a different concept of how people will play together. Maybe we forgot some things that were good about play experience. Maybe we want the computer to be a device that is more like a hearth that members of the family come around and use to interact with each other.
Nick Montfort on Atari and video games in the Boston Globe
![Atari 2600 photo](https://cmsw-mit-edu.ezproxyberklee.flo.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/Atari-2600-Wood-4Sw-Set-scaled-716x413.jpg)
“I wouldn’t want to argue that the Atari way was better. But it has a different concept of how people will play together.”