Playing for Fun

Generally, a toy is a game you play by yourself. Like building a boat, or gliding around looking for thermals on a marvelous day, or taking a new car out for an early-morning drive, or putting on scuba gear and exploring the womb of the sea. You and a device, letting it happen, finding yourself--and the world--by losing yourself, losing track of time, getting in touch with feelings and ideas and strengths and beauty that may be important and are certainly refreshing, often in surprising ways. In short, a toy is a mechanical companion for exploring without and within; a thing for being alone with, yet a thing to keep you in touch with the world.

Some toys blend precision and pleasure in a way that has tempted most of us to take the trouble to learn to use them well, and this mastery is in itself continually satisfying. Their variety comes from the world with which they put us in touch: the sea or the sky or the bush or the open road on the one hand, and all those things within us we know too little about. True, there are people with sports cars they'll never appreciate, but the guy who's worked hard to buy a worthy set of wheels or wings is usually capable of rising to a fulfilling man-machine affair: clean, free, joyous and deeply rewarding.

Some people maintain that games, rather than toys, provide greater self-awareness. The Walt Disneys of the world are forever reminding us that the cubs, pups and kittens of all the mammalian species, including our own, naturally love playing games. They improvise tag, war, hide-and-seek and mimicry, following instinctive and universal rules. But the adults of our species have sought to regiment the natural play instinct in our young--with regulations, judges, uniforms, training, discipline, even deprivation, marshaling youngsters into teams and leagues, ranks and heroes, turning play into such organized "sport" that finally only the very best are allowed to take part. To increase the intensity, the best-looking girls are recruited into sexually provocative cadres to urge the boys on to fight (as in football), like some monstrous parody of wartime, until uniforms have to be armored, injury becomes a common mark of honor and even death is no stranger to the high school playing fields.

Beneath the aberrant intensity of these "educational" games lies the myth of the sound mind in the sound body. Kids good at sport are usually popular, gregarious and capable of working within the rules. They're often well built and energetic. They've learned to handle unexpected situations and they don't hog the ball. They're moral, respectful, self-confident and sometimes heroic. They've learned to work for success and, supposedly, to snatch victory from defeat. But while organized, disciplined violence may yet have its place in this far-from-perfect world, it's hard to imagine moving the team from the playing field into the lab so the boys can lick cancer the way they took Iowa State. A totally different sort of teamwork is required to turn out a film or to put a spaceship on the moon. The difference lies not merely in specialized knowledge but in creativity. And that's where those solitary yo-yos, the toy people, enter the picture.

In one of the best studies of creativity published to date, American sociologists Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi concluded that "the creative impulse of artists and scientists is imbedded in the deeper layers of personality--in their values and motives. A surprisingly similar set of personal characteristics has been found for creative people in extremely diverse fields. Although there are individual differences, the general pattern includes a combination of high theoretical and aesthetic values, low extroversion, disinterest in gregarious activities, self-sufficiency and resistance to group persuasion." That kind of person would never make the team.

To promote an economy based (continued on page 116)Playing for Fun(continued from page 110) on reduced labor and increased innovation, and to cope with the ensuing leisure problems, we can no longer afford to develop docile teams of worker-consumers at the expense of the creative individual. In the lab, the shop, the office and the conference room, creativity rather than disciplined brawn has become the basis of growth. Already, business is spending twice as much as the universities in retraining the products of our educational system for its evolving needs. Soon, one can foresee the development of a mathematically based toy theory to complement game theory. Toy theory will systematically explore the mechanisms of contemplation, solitary work, man-machine relations, fun and entertainment, involvement, imagination, contrariness or a way of losing oneself to find something new, some new relationship, some neglected truth. And to get toy theory started, we'll have to know the difference between a toy and a game.

Game theory is concerned with the interaction of individuals and groups of all sizes, either through cooperation or competition or both. Because a game is by nature ritualistic, structured and dependent on established rules, it tends to be backward oriented and conformist. It is social for both participants and spectators but not characteristically creative for either. Playing games means playing roles: We are rarely free to be ourselves.

As opposed to a game, a toy is a solitary device, permitting the individual to exercise his fantasy, imagination and creative powers. It lets him lower his defenses, to explore his own resources and personality. It permits a retreat from human discussion and allows a dialog between the individual and the symbols of his society. The toy is the essential, neglected element in creativity. It is man-machine: sports car, typewriter, camera, fishing rod.

In this light, computers, though structured like games, are--for those who control them--toys. They augment and support the creative, imaginative potential of the individual. They allow him to invent new systems that, if successful, can be introduced to society as games.

Toy theory is concerned with the changing relationship between structured game and anarchic toy. It should help us explore and understand why the institution (game center) is collapsing and the individual (supported by more and more powerful toys) will win increasing freedom and become more productive.

Now that we've learned to master, accept and enjoy the mechanical leisure toys--the car and its cousins, such as the boat and the plane--a new type of toy has appeared and is spreading like laughter among us: the time-sharing computer, with its remote terminals that let us talk and play back and forth with it and drive it through the world of ideas almost as though it were an automobile. In the past four years, since the arrival of the third-generation computers, with their easy man-machine dialog and their almost-English language, the computer population has shot from 15,000 to 67,200; each of the big new IBM 360s and the RCA Spectra 70s can support hundreds of terminals and each user has the distinct impression that the whole marvelous engine is at his sole command. And for so many billionths of a second in every minute, it's true. Like those chess geniuses who can play simultaneous games blindfolded, the machines can take on scores of us at a time, yet rarely keep us waiting for a move. We can use them for hours at a sitting and still pay only for the paltry few seconds we actually consume. Each day, the machines become easier to talk to and to use, and their terminals become more varied in expression, yet simpler for us to learn. Soon only our shyness and fear will prevent us from starting our own personal, computerized man-machine affair. And this fear, which, unfortunately, is sometimes promoted by the humanists, the priests of elite culture and the liberal-arts students ("I am not an IBM card; do not fold, staple or mutilate"), may be keeping us from a spiritual adventure as large as thought itself.

We've already been through this bogey with the automobile. Those of our grandparents who had deep, affective ties to nature through the horse could only look on the horseless carriage as a foul, noisome, dangerous, bloodless substitute, whose owner was losing far more than he gained in the trade. Now through a car we can relate to sea, desert, forest, mountains, and to a society that collectively and anonymously provides us with roads and service. A car has become a spiritual as well as a physical necessity, and he who can't afford one is underpaid.

You can look at a car, get into it and understand it. If it does something unexpected, then there's been a breakdown, and the car can be fixed or traded. You can kick its tires, count on its performance and learn to live with its limitations. However, a computer is amorphous. Its appearance seems almost nonfunctional, its performance noncircumscribed and--with sophisticated programing--unpredictable. To the outsider, that's frightening--like fooling around with the brain. Frankenstein's monster is dusted off and revived for a sequel, with the Orwells busy warning us what might happen if the computer's power were to fall into the wrong hands; i.e., the Government's, when all the goods they have on us in their various files could be instantly marshaled against us.

However, the real power lies not in the computer as drudge or censor but within ourselves, when we learn to use it as a toy, to turn on with it and follow a thought or a feeling through to the end, as fast as the mind can go. Those who've been privileged to foster its growth and its time-sharing powers speak of the fun of using it--of losing one's sense of time, of forgetting to eat, of having to be led away to sleep. These people are the early Christians of a new individualism. They are lovers, lost in a great affair. For them, computers are potential colleagues that will eventually surpass us in intellectual power. Most of these people are hidden in the universities, particularly in the great technological centers such as MIT, where time sharing and the cathode-ray terminal were born. And because of their presence, many universities are making time sharing a regular part of student life. Dartmouth, because of John Kemeny (formerly one of Einstein's assistants), sees to it that every student logs a minimum number of hours at a terminal before getting his degree. Others are following suit as fast as they can get delivery on the big new machines. Now 100 of these universities have banded together to network their computer and television facilities into a national educational resource. Soon students and researchers, alone with a terminal in Nevada or New Hampshire, will command the resources of Stanford and Berkeley, of Harvard and MIT--a Faustian power up to now beyond the reach if not beyond the dreams of the strongest governments. The third-generation computers, upon whose broad memory and speed-of-light operations this new power is based, are hardly four years old. Debugging, deliveries and programs are only starting to make their impact on our society. Most computer operations are still run on old, second-generation machines; but already, fourth-generation computers are being tested--computers 500 times as powerful as the 360s and the Spectra 70s behind the present revolution. Computer problems that cost $500 to solve with today's fastest machines should cost a few dollars tomorrow and pennies after that. Do you want your terminal in the living room or in the study? Do you want it in blue or in green, with black or white buttons? Better decide before you have the place repainted. The thinkers were the last to let TV into their homes. This time, it will be the other way around.

Unfortunately, it's still hard to get hold of anything at the bookstore to help you take this in. The shiny new paperbacks are still talking about the miracles of the second-generation machines, and you have to read the small print of the. copyright notices pretty carefully to make sure the books weren't really written back in the computer stone age (before 1965). Most of the courses available to us are still training (continued on page 174)Playing for Fun(continued from page 116) programmers in obsolescent and even archaic processing techniques, without a terminal and without the new languages. This isn't play, it's drudgery. But soon it will pass, for we're involved in an accelerating revolution of staggering proportions, which will transform our institutions and our lives. What's even harder to grasp is that there is no final stage in sight, no settling down. We're entering a nonlinear era when all possible pasts and presents will coexist and where all conceivable futures are rushing toward us. Each of us will live many lives, some of them simultaneously and not a few of them deeply and profoundly--all because of the toy.

When we want to study or work creatively, everything seems to conspire against us. We need books and papers and articles to bring us the problem's dimensions and the solutions others have tried. We need tools, perhaps slide rules or calculators, perhaps only paper and pen. We need quiet and solitude. We need challenge, leadership and the chance to discuss the problem intelligently on our highest level of understanding. We need the drive to avoid the distractions of our subconscious needs--or, if not, we're shooting the breeze, dating, goofing off at the movies, working on easier problems, dozing. But once we control these psychological hazards, the miracle usually happens and we find ourselves involved beyond time, turned on, sensitive, deeply aware, resonant, working the world. Of all the many ways to turn on--sex, drugs, nature, conversation, games, entertainment--the most deeply satisfying and longest lasting seems to be creativity. So far, it's been the hardest. The computer as toy will change this. When it does, nothing will be the same: not we, not our friends and--especially--not our institutions.

There are some solid reasons our institutions seem to be hesitating to innovate. Almost by definition, an institution is an embodiment of an ideal, dedicated to a proposition. Even a business institution has to offer society something worth while. If it doesn't, it stands to run out of customers and go bankrupt--or it gets pursued through the courts by the state. The institutional ideal is embodied in its princes and its chiefs, and the ideal passes through them to the members of the institution's staff. Ultimately, this ideal saves institutions from budget slashes and other forms of attack. Solidity is all, hence the architecture, the conformity and the rather square humanism, of the cautious bureaucratic mold. Should the ideal be shaken by experimentation that backfires, the ultimate defense--the ideal itself--may not be sufficient to protect the institution from attacks by the press, the courts or the holders of the public purse strings.

When the master toy becomes generally available, very few of our great public or corporate institutions will survive as we know them. Their ideals and their purposes will be so drastically transformed that their princes will fall. Their methods will be radically changed. Their great buildings will no longer be needed. We will have to dismiss them as out-stitutions and turn to new systems based on new technologies and serving new needs.

Let's take the communications institutions, to start: the press, the library, the theater, publishing and broadcasting. They will be most dramatically affected and have the least excuse for not knowing what's going on. Perhaps the most modern of these, and the most technological--broadcasting--provides a good example of the transformations the master toy implies.

In the next medium, the medium after television, you have a terminal at home, with a screen--probably with higher definition than today's television, capable of resolving 1000 lines or points, instead of the present 525. There's a keyboard or a dial for making your wishes and feelings known, plus some kind of print-out device for hard copy--text and illustration. This home communicator is connected by a simple cable through a buffer and switcher to the vast computer network and its omnibus memory. Entertainment, news, information--everything is there at your command, when you want to see it, as often as you wish. News is added to the bank as fast as it is digested; and if you want to know more about something, you merely ask. If you especially care about medical or engineering or labor news, it keeps you up to date whenever you have a moment--or it prints out the day's developments over-night. Recipes, first-aid instruction, personally graded exercises, language instruction, the state of your stock portfolio--all these are easy to program. Instructional material, from how to build a pipe rack to how to draw up a critical path or how to behave in Burma, will be generally available; and the methods of making these courses personally responsive to the individual are already known and are being used in nearly 400 CAI (computer-assisted instruction) programs. Did you miss last fall's series on Japanese industry, and now you're being sent there on assignment? Dial it up. If you've grown interested in Roman archaeology, the unit can tell you that the BBC has just put out a program that you might like to see. Perhaps you'd like to dial up a Buster Keaton festival or see film versions of the works of Albert Camus. None of this is beyond today's technology: It's just a matter of cost. If you'd need $10,000 a year to subscribe to third-generation machines, the fourth generation should bring it down to a couple of hundred; and five years from now, as the fifth generation rolls around, the service will be cheaper than community-antenna television.

Where does the demand broadcasting (or narrowcasting, as MIT's Joseph Lick-lider calls it) leave today's broadcaster? He becomes a minor supplier of programs: an interviewer of local officials, an occasional news gatherer, a filmer of regional sports, an agent for signing up local commercials. Gone is the nonsense of scheduling and its prime-time concepts. Prime time will be whenever you want to see something. Gone will be balanced programing, equal time and the doom-and-disaster concept of news. True, the networks will still show Son of Laugh-In on Sundays at ten; but if you like, you can wait for the critics before you take the time to watch; for it'll be there all week, or all year, for that matter. Gone will be the summer desert, with its reruns (a now-meaningless term); gone the 58-minute and 30-second program: They will find their own length. Gone is the stupid waste of brilliant programs that found only part of their audience because nobody's always free to watch what he'd like when the schedulers want him to. If you want to watch Wayne and Shuster in the original Canadian version, or Peter Cook and Spike Milligan on the BBC, or Japanese or Swedish programs, they're about to be there when you want them, via low-cost satellite transmission.

In fact, with demand broadcasting, various communications institutions--the press, the libraries, the broadcasters, the film distributors--will all be fused into one vast communications institution, with many private suppliers, as well as the computers, sharing the spoils. A look at the recent acquisitions of vast corporations such as RCA will show you that this is well on the way.

Lord Thomson, the British communications baron, once described his Scottish TV-broadcast-station permit as "a license to print money." Seventy years ago, he might have said the same thing about an exclusive buggy dealership. Today, the future of these investments appears to be in doubt. The CATV, telephone and telegraph people are all maneuvering to exploit demand broadcasting through their existing cable networks; and there is at present a strong movement to deprive television of its enormous frequency allotments in the broadcast spectrum by putting it all on cable, so that the essential and expanding mobile transmissions may have room to grow. The present-day institution of broadcasting may soon be a historical oddity.

The institution of education has become the state religion, based on coercion, drudgery and an undue respect for the past. Salvation, since Sputnik, seems to lie in technology. Though the really modern school has big, shiny buildings named after successful politicians, and all sorts of "scientific" accouterments, the basic idea is still to bunch students into groups of 30 or so and drag them along at the dismal pace of the slower learners. To alleviate boredom, instead of individualizing instruction, educators introduced mass media: film projectors (more boredom) and ETV (for sleeping and doing homework). In grade schools, to rein back the little devils' notorious capacity for mischief, teachers are issued overhead projectors, so they needn't turn their backs to write on the blackboard. Now it's almost impossible to pass notes, sling paper clips or read something interesting. What to do with your energy as the period drags on? You certainly can't use it for learning, because if something should happen to interest you, bong goes the bell. Anyway, teachers are more interested in teaching than in learning. Most of them still want you to pass their feudal exams, dress like everyone else and be as anonymous as you can. You're indoctrinated with the thought that all of these days of penance will somehow pay off in a lifetime of grace as soon as you get into the real world. And to further the myth, escapees, no matter how brilliant and clear-sighted (after all, they've seen through the system), are labeled drop-outs and stigmatized for life.

Opposed to this dismal mass-education approach are some pretty bright experiments by the toy people. Here, the emphasis is on learning, not on teaching; on the student, instead of on the class; on channeling and multiplying the individual's energy, instead of on curbing it for the good of the group. The toy people are tearing out the milk-crate rows of seats, the bleak square walls, the rigid timetable, the concept of the class that stays together all through the year. Instead, they are scheduling the anarchy with a computer programed to look after each student's interests, problems and needs. They're putting in individualized film-loop projectors, dial-access systems, language labs (why should everyone be turned off while one student reads his homework to the teacher?) and computer-learning machines. This is our friend the home communicator under another guise; there is already a score of such systems in use. Educators have found that with a good machine, such as Omar Moore's talking typewriter (which pronounces letters and words as they are typed), tots of three can read and publish their own magazines.

The educational authorities say it will be 10 to 15 years before computer learning machines will be generally introduced in the schools; and unless there's another challenge like Sputnik, it will probably take longer than that. But two or three years will see the ultimate toy enter the home, and then the kids will go wild, learning things when they're ready, asking questions parents can't answer, playing games, cruising through their homework, finding out about drama, science and art, discovering who they are and what they like and the miraculous joys of the mind. We'll be back in the Elizabethan times, when the kids went on to the university at 15 and 16. There'll be no reason to keep them out. Their minds will be tumbling with facts and ideas, a broad spectrum of current thought, backed by some cogent history, integrated with their personalities. They'll be itching for debate and challenge and reinforcement from top thinkers and the chance to get their fingers on the electron microscopes, lasers and atom smashers--all the big toys the university can provide.

When that starts to happen, the computer will begin entering the office as a toy. Of course, it's already there as a drudge, looking after billing and payroll and inventory. It's been used to simulate marketing situations and help lay out critical paths. But through individual terminals, it will become the daily companion of executives, customer's men, designers, researchers, forecasters, salesmen--in short, anyone from whom initiative is expected in the pursuit and development of his job, all the way up to and including the boss. The first companies that throw out the remnants of their coercive systems and introduce the turn-on toys will attract the most creative people. If they can handle the explosion, they will rocket up Fortune's list of the 500 biggest companies like squirrels up trees. You can see it happening already in the ads for creative people placed by growth industries in the Sunday New York Times. You can see the bait they're using: building big war toys, space toys and transportation toys; using toys to build them; and extolling the recreational joys and educational advantages of their particular boondocks. But until each of us gets his own personal master toy, we are still out of touch and held back in our work. However, the trend is there: For the men who are making tomorrow, education, creativity, work and entertainment are becoming synonymous. When the master toy makes it happen, business institutions will be completely transformed and we'll all be ten feet tall.

Under our patient tutelage, machines have evolved from mechanical pets to intellectual companions, and already we're getting on well together. Sooner or later, we'll get used to the idea of living with the changes machines will make in our society. Then we will have to face new challenges in our relationship, for our toys will take on a biological dimension, to watch over our weight, diet, exercise and personal indulgences. Each day, as we submit to the machine's intimate examination of our mortal coils, we will rest in the assurance that hospitals, with their diseases and poisonous anesthetics and barbaric surgery, will soon be a thing of the past. And I suppose some of us will be ready to try man/machine sex, when they cybernate our pleasure centers through sensors, stimulators and manipulators. The ultimate state in this progressive man-toy liaison is projected by Arthur C. Clarke, the poet of spiritual growth through technology, in the closing chapters of his Profiles of the Future:

One day we may be able to enter into temporary unions with any sufficiently sophisticated machines, thus being able not merely to control but to become a spaceship or a submarine or a TV network. This would give far more than purely intellectual satisfaction; the thrill that can be obtained from driving a racing car or flying an airplane may be only a pale ghost of the excitement our great-grandchildren may know, when the individual human consciousness is free to roam at will from machine to machine, through all the reaches of sea and sky and space.

Like a book, the master toy is a device for storing up the distilled knowledge and best thinking of our species, putting it at our disposition on demand. Unlike books, our master toys will play a radical role in transforming that knowledge into energy, which, like Einstein's atom, moves at the speed of light and is the source of limitless power. The Greek philosophers feared that books would destroy the memory, leaving the mind unsupported; but we've conquered that fear--and others--to rise to new pleasure, strength and wealth. Now it seems the hurdles are getting closer and closer together. It sometimes seems as if we have to keep running and jumping faster, and it's no longer possible to stop and see where we are. If we could look back at the present from the coming decades, we might see that it isn't an ever more frantic race but a take-off; and that the late Sixties, with their time-shared computer toys, showed the way to overleap the inanities, the extravagances, the barbarities, the waste of human potential that our present institutions represent. And just for kicks, since the highways are much too crowded, we will crawl into our simulator, set the dial for Sopwith Camel, pull back the joy stick and joust a few rounds with the Red Baron over the green fields of France.