Science Fiction Prototyping. Brian David Johnson

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

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