Go read Philipp Lenssen’s story Stupid Smart Toys. You’ll be glad you did.
Now, as Tyler and his mom stood before the rattling boxes in the kids’ store, Mom was feeling the widening generation gap (toys were sure different in her time!). A little plastic window in each box was offering a glance at how the model performed its abilities, live, for hours on end – it almost looked like there was a living being trapped inside. Just last week, Mom read about a campaign by the Artificial Intelligence Rights Group who battled against the selling of extra smart toys. Smartbot Inc. countered with the usual public statement that each bot was “limited by design” to only show “truly artificial” intelligence without signs of “real intelligence.” By limiting each model to just a single advanced capability, the company said, even “sparks of actual human intelligence” were prevented.In short, Smartbots didn’t have wants, needs, self-reflection or soul, the company argued. They were lower beings merely reacting to orders – the orders of kids. Stupid smart toys.
As I said in the comments to Philipp’s post, any story based on smart toys reminds me immediately of three things: the Brian Aldiss short story Super-Toys Last All Summer Long, the Stanley Kubrick/Steven Spielberg movie A.I., which was based on Aldiss’ short story, and the alternate reality game created by Elan Lee and Sean Stewart to promote the movie (called The Beast both by the Puppetmasters who created the game and by the players who played it).
The movie was a bit disappointing, but the game was not. Here’s Sean Stewart:
On the game, there was no time for serious or respectable either. The game was freaking pastiche Armageddon: It started from a Spielberg script inflected with Kubrick notions from a Brian Aldiss short story with echoes of Dune and Clockwork Orange, for God’s sake. Political tracts. Corporate boasting. Sex-kitten catalogues. Mysterious Oriental Gentlemen. Wistful midlife crises. Suicide notes. Gibsonian cyberpunk. I stole or hot-wired or tweaked up Shakespeare and John Donne and Tim O’Brien, Ovid and Iain Banks and Puccini and Bladerunner. I wrote every genre character ever invented, I think–bounty hunters and kept women and a bad guy made of nightmares, religious zealots and angry teenagers and streetwise hackers. Hookers with hearts of gold available on request from Belladerma SRL, in sizes petite to extra large, or (in one of the game’s creepiest phrases) cut to fit….
…I was talking to my friend Scott Baker, a very talented writer who was working on what would become our Viet Nam, the more than 200 pages of script for the mad virtual ghost, Eliza. “You know, Sean, I like your novels a lot,” he said, “…but you were born to do this.”
Maybe so. It was the most incredible, exhilarating experience of my professional career. It was street theater and a con game and a pennant drive rolled into one. As long as I have been writing, I have struggled under the feeling of trying to live up to the work of other writers–Tolkien or Austen or Banks or Dostoyevsky or some damn guy. The Beast was different. For one thing, I had team-mates this time (the same advantage Shakespeare had and don’t think he didn’t milk Burbage and those guys dry). And for once I felt like we were setting the bar.
Released in 2001 and officially solved on July 24, 2001 by the loose-knit group of players dubbed The Cloudmakers, the whole experience was incredible. My one moment of glory in that game was a puzzle from May 23rd, 2001.
Earlier, we had discovered that if you went to the website of Martin Swinton Designs and clicked on the moon at the top of the page, you’d get the password entry page for Martin’s diary. In the version archived on the Cloudmakers page, the password window says Alas, poor Yorick! — I knew him, Horatio; The answer, of course is “a fellow of infinite jest”. Go read Hamlet if you don’t understand why. The diary entry for that day included some pictures; click on the one with the paintbrushes, and you get another picture complete with the sound of water dripping from the brushes into the sink.
Nothing in that game was ever what it seemed, so the sound of the drips was of course a morse code message that translated to:
TO MARTIN
1304 1300 1 TLE SRY SRY 1TL53
SLRXG FXUNE AXPWT LRKLP TEOFI YZCGA ZZFUQ LINRS HPWLR BHBMM ZOM
I was, I believe, the first to post to the Cloudmakers group the translation and suggest that it was an Enigma-encoded message. Someone beat me to the post of the solution, however, which was “I’m so sorry. I don’t have a choice. He’s got my sister.” Not much to hang my hat on, but it’s all I got.
So why ramble on about a seven year old web game created to promote a largely-forgotten Haley Joel Osment movie? Some experiences are so engrossing and some creations so groundbreaking that they change how you view things forever. Reading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings was like that. Blade Runner was like that. So was Atlas Shrugged. I can’t read epic fantasy without thinking of Gandalf. Anything dystopian reminds me of Decker. I have no idea if The Beast was the first ARG - Wikipedia suggests Dreadnot, originally published in 1996. But The Beast blew the doors off anything that came before it. It really was the “Citizen Kane of online entertainment,” as Internet Life called it. It was creative, mind-numbingly deep, and incredibly engrossing. The Puppetmasters changed the game on the fly - there was a whole subplot created from a 404 error because the designers didn’t get something finished on time, for example.
Because it was so groundbreaking, I haven’t tried anything since. Not Majestic or I Love Bees. Not even The Lost Experience. Some things just stick with you forever, and I’ll always be a Cloudmaker, wonder when I’ll be able to enroll at Bangalore World University or take my super-toy to the Electric Toyland Repair Shop (bringing us full-circle to Stupid Smart Toys).
I too am a big fan of the Terminator movies. Of course, in my world, there were only two. T3 never existed. And that’s one reason I’ve been digging the TV version. It reimagines the world after T2 as if the aberration that was T3 never occurred. maybe the time travelers went back and erased it.
