CHAPTER 1

      The Future Is in Your Hands

      In 1983, I was 11 years old. That year, I saw a movie that changed my life forever. That movie affected me deeply that there was one point during the show that I got so into the story, so wrapped up in the drama that I had to leave the theater and walk around in the lobby a little to calm down. Now for an 11-year-old … that was a movie!

      My memory of that movie and the ideas it put in my head still affect me today. This might sound a little overblown but it is true. Now the title of the movie might not be what you would expect and how it affected me might seem even less obvious, but they are both significant.

      The title of the movie was WarGames. Starring Mathew Broderick and Ally Sheedy, the movie tells the story of David Lightman (Broderick), an American teenager who is really good at computers but not so good at life. Essentially, he was a computer geek before most people really knew what a computer geek was. In the movie, David accidentally hacks into the government’s War Operations Plan Response computer (WOPR) while he is looking for a mysterious game company called Protovision. Protovision’s sleek black brochure pictures kids, their faces aglow with wonder and excitement with the text: “Things will never be the same … A quantum leap in computer games from Protovision.” Who would not want to play those games? That was the mystery and wonder that WarGames was tapping into. Things would never be the same again, and it was computers that were going to bring it all to you.

      As the movie moves forward, we learn that the artificial intelligence (AI) that runs WOPRs was designed by Stephen Falken, a character loosely based on the theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking. Falken has named the AI, Joshua, after his dead son, and teaches the computer through a series of strategy games like tic-tac-toe, checkers, poker and chess.

      When David hacks into WOPR, he sees a series of tactical games like Theaterwide Biotoxic Chemical Warfare and Global Thermonuclear War. Thinking he has found the game company, he begins playing Global Thermonuclear War with Joshua. What David does not know is that WOPR has taken over the United States nuclear missile system and is preparing to launch a strike against the Soviet Union and start World War III.

      In the early 1980s, the Soviet Union was still very much a threat, and the specter of nuclear war hung over both our countries. With the popularity of personal computers, like the Texas Instruments TI99, the concept of computers was taking hold in American pop culture. Ultimately, WarGames is a cautionary tale about the futility of war and the danger associated with giving computers too much control over our lives. But WarGames was just one of the movies from the 1980s that capitalized on the growing personal computer craze. Movies like Tron, D.A.R.Y.L., Weird Science, Electric Dreams, The Last Starfighter, and Explorers began to tell stories that brought computers into our homes and our daily lives. For the first time, science fiction was coming into your house and you could be the main character. But it was not science fiction anymore … it was real. The computers were real, the technology was real, and you could program your own computer to do almost anything it seemed. With imaginations fueled by these future visions, an entire generation started programming, building games and basically geeked out doing all the things that today, in 2011, seem as normal as flipping on the light switch. Today, most of us live quite comfortably with computers knit into everything we do, but back in 1983, it was new and exciting.

      So at this point, you might be wondering, how did this movie change my life?

      Well, during the movie when David is hacking into WOPR and playing games, the film cuts between the ominous blinking activity lights on WOPR and David playing war games with Joshua. Staring at those lights in the midst of the action, I wanted to know what was going on inside the computer. I tried to imagine how the computer worked. I wanted to know how an AI that complex could be built. How did you program such a thing? With my heart racing, I imagined how to do it. I could envision what was going on inside the big box with the silly name on the side.

      I was already a geek before I saw WarGames, but the movie showed me that computers could be exciting. For me, the computer, Joshua, was the hero of the movie. I did not really care what happened to David. To me, WarGames was exciting because for the first time I imagined how to build something that I could not see. My mind literally opened up in that dark theater. I know now that I was thinking through high level system architectures, software stacks and network diagrams. The images of the WOPR and the AI were complex and intriguing, and if I used imagination and what I knew about computers, I could see how you might build it.

      The most famous line from the movie is when the AI Joshua asks David, “Shall we play a game?” the words crudely vocalized through a make-believe voice synthesizer. But those words “Shall we play a game?” captured everything that was exciting and amazing about the movie.

      Yes! I wanted to play a game. And I have been working with science and imaging technology ever since.

WarGames AS AN SF PROTOTYPE

      In 1983, WarGames was a thriller of near-term science fiction. The writers, Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes, with the help of Peter Schwartz from the Stanford Research Institute, combined the capabilities of a new kind of personal computer with the threat of a nuclear war brought on by over-automation. When you think about it that way, WarGames is a kind of science fiction (SF) prototype.

      What is a science fiction prototype? Stated simply, it is a short story, movie or comic based specifically on a science fact for the purpose of exploring the implications, effects and ramifications of that science or technology (we’ll get into the details of SF prototypes and prototypes in general in Chapter 2). WarGames imagines what could happen if a computer was given control over the U.S. government’s missile defense system, and something went terribly wrong.

      Of course in the movie, the terribly wrong things are that David stumbles onto Joshua, the AI, and the two begin playing war games, not knowing that the games are being played out in real life.