Shall We Play A Game?

I watched WARGAMES for the first time last night. If you haven’t seen it, the movie’s from 1983, and it’s about a teenage hacker who accidentally breaks into NORAD’s computers while trying to impress a girl. He winds up triggering a wargame simulation, but Joshua, the computer controlling the simulation, isn’t programmed to distinguish between simulation and reality and starts trying to take control of the nuclear missile launch sites.

It’s always interesting to watch science fiction from the past and see how its conception of the future compared to reality. And WARGAMES is definitely science fiction, since in 1983 there wasn’t a computer that could perform natural language processing as well as Joshua. Heck, even nowadays computers aren’t quite that good at natural language processing, as the occasional YouTube clips of Alexa and Siri mishaps demonstrate.

But it’s interesting to watch old science fiction because it shows how people from the past feared the potential future. The fear of nuclear war, of course, is a common theme. Like, if you read science fiction from the 70s or the 80s, a common assumption is that the US and the Soviets would destroy one another in a nuclear war sometime in the 1990s and the 2000s. Of course, (spoiler alert!) it didn’t quite work out that way.

The fear of computers, though, is an interesting theme from old science fiction. WARGAMES did a good job of introducing the audience to concepts (hacking, information warfare, password security) that are common nowadays but would have been novel to most people in 1983. Of course, science fiction almost never gets the future right. The character of Dr. Falken’s fear that mankind would inevitably destroy itself through nuclear war turned out (so far) not to have been accurate. For that matter, a lot of 80s science fiction predicted that computers would run the world.

They do, sort of, but instead of the Master Computer on TRON or Joshua running amok with nuclear missiles, what we actually ended up with were Facebook ads, product unboxing videos on YouTube, and emails from Amazon informing us that customers who were interested in WARGAMES might also be interested in FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF, TRON, and the HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER.

The best thing about old science fiction, at least in my opinion, is that it shows how bad people are at predicting the future. So if you’re ever troubled by the Prophets of Doom on the news confidently proclaiming how the world will end because their spreadsheet told them so, read some old science fiction about how World War III started in 1995 with a nuclear exchange between the US and the Soviets. 🙂

-JM