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Young adults love to play games and they're thirsty for social interaction, but a lot of bar and restaurant experiences are quite unsatisfactory on the social level. What young people need is a place that has the feel of an unhosted party where they find themselves interacting with like-minded strangers.

These days when you say 'videogame', people think of immersive games that take over your life and require three thumbs to control. My goal is to create games that almost retreat into the background. I'm interested in bringing them back to their role as a social facilitator, the way party games help people to interact.

The game business arose from computer programs that were written by and for young men in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They worked so well that they formed a very lucrative industry fairly quickly. But what worked for that demographic absolutely did not work for most girls and women.

Games are the way we keep romance alive. They're based in human hardwiring. Playing hard-to-get or leaving a little to the imagination allows the woman to be wooed and appreciated and the man to be challenged and intrigued.

We have fun, we listen to one another, we challenge one another, we trust one another. We're doing what we enjoy, and we're not just playing for each other, we're playing for the people.

In the early days of the video game business, everybody played. The question is, what happened? My theory - and I think it's pretty well borne out - is that in the '80s, games got gory, and that lost the women. And then they got complex, and that lost the casual gamer.

It seemed like, when I was a teenager, there was a video game everywhere: they were in 7-Elevens, movie theatres, pizza shops; they were everywhere.

Games are a compromise between intimacy and keeping intimacy away.

The great thing about games is that it's tremendously collaborative, and it opens you up to this other world of thinking and storytelling and how you construct those stories.

Gaming has been a great way to get to know people. That's part of what I love about games, that they are social.