Steve Jobs on gaming

I saw this great video today of Steve Jobs talking about gaming in 1990 while he was CEO of NeXT, during his hiatus from Apple. Steve had a close but complicated relationship with gaming, he even started his career in the birthplace of computer games, working the nightshifts at Atari (they moved him off days because of his antisocial behaviour and unpleasant body odour), before returning to Apple and making it a very unwelcome place to the game industry. You could argue that he only made it unwelcome through inaction, but while the Mac marketshare had withered in his absence, he didn't make any move to court the game industry, instead pursuing the education and creative professional markets.

That all changed when the iPhone's app store launched and games ended up being ludicrously lucrative for everyone involved, now sixteen of the top 25 most-purchased apps on the app store are game titles, with great name recognition like Angry Birds, Flight Control and Scrabble.

It has rarely proved worthwhile in the long run betting against Steve Jobs' vision, and that's why I think this chat he has with Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog is so interesting. He forecasts something here in 1990 that most now would consider a foregone conclusion; the digitisation and proliferation of reference materials over the (invented, but yet to be released) world wide web, but he also predicts the maturation of interactive media into something enriching and educational.

If that still seems a little far-fetched, there has been some really interesting work done recently bringing Portal and Minecraft into the classroom to teach things like physics, electronics, geometry, mathematics etc.

As a wee bonus, once he's done talking about gaming and the Library of Congress, Steve goes on to give his somewhat famous "bicycle" speech about how computers extend the efficiency of our minds. I recommend sticking around if you haven't heard it before.