The Playful World: How Technology Is Transforming Our Imagination [Hardcover]

Mark Pesce (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 3, 2000

As you read these words, the architects of the new virtual reality are inventing a world you never imagined: call it the playful world. It's a world of interactive Web-based toys that instantly collapse the gulf between wish and existence, space and time, animate and inanimate. It's a world where the entire fabric of the material world becomes manipulable, programmable, mutable. Situated at the crossroads of high technology and popular culture, the playful world is taking shape at the speed of electronic creativity.

Are you ready for it? Your kids are.

In this spellbinding new book, Mark Pesce, one of the pioneers in the ongoing technological revolution, explores how a new kind of knowing and a new way of creating are transforming the culture of our time. It started, bizarrely enough, with Furbys, the first toys that had the "will" to grow and interact intelligently with their environment. As Pesce argues, Furbys, for all their cloying cuteness, were a vital sign of a new human endeavor--the ability to copy part of our own intelligence into the physical world.

But engineers of the playful world have already gone much further into considerably stranger virtual realms. Pesce takes us inside the world's cutting-edge research facilities where the distinction between bits and atoms is rapidly dissolving. We meet the creators of LEGO Mindstorms, a snap-together plastic device that intelligently controls motors and processes data from sensors. We watch technological geniuses like Marvin Minsky and Eric Drexler turn the theoretical breakthroughs of Nobel laureate Richard Feynman into "nanites"-- tiny ultra-high-speed computers that replicate intelligent life. We observe the launch of the amazing and much-anticipated Sony Playstation 2, a platform that will allow us to bring synthetic worlds into the home and create a gateway to the living planet.

Web-based toys are only the beginning--the first glimmer of a new reality that is transforming our entire culture with incredible speed and power. After all,  thanks to the computer revolution and the Internet, all of us already command powers that just a generation ago would have been described as magical. Magic is about to take on a whole new dimension. In this dazzling book, Mark Pesce offers a mind-bending preview of the incredible future that awaits us all in The Playful World.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Are Furbies avatars of future pets? Mark Pesce, Chair of USC's Interactive Media Program and creator of VRML, thinks that technological development and recreational activity inform each other and are converging into a strange, new immersive environment. The Playful World: Interactive Toys and the Future of Imagination is a thoughtful peek into the guts of such toys as LEGO's Mindstorms and Sony's PlayStation2; by extrapolation, Pesce sees them driving research in nanotechnology and virtual reality, but he nobly refuses to succumb to the temptation to make precise predictions.

Taking a look at the history of play (and taking care to knock down whatever remaining resistance we might have to considering play less worthwhile than other activities), the book shows it to be a form of learning--perhaps the most natural form. Toy technology is catching up with current research rapidly; more households have powerful computers playing "Crazy Taxi" with the kids than working on budgets with parents. The presumption that we are creating new ways of learning, knowing, and being that are rapidly overtaking our means to understand and control them could be frightening if explored by an author less familiar with the technology and its users. Instead of thinking "game over," Pesce believes we should get ready to "play again." --Rob Lightner

Review

“Mark Pesce is one of those fascinating visionaries who contributes as much to the culture of imagination as to technology itself.”
–Wired

“CAPTIVATING . . . When we alter the way we see, hear, and touch the world, we alter ourselves. If you want a preview of the coming world and its humanity, read this intriguing new book.”
–Upside Magazine

[A] thought-provoking look at how these gifted researchers turn theories into realities far beyond anything we can imagine, things that would have seemed like magic only a generation ago.”
–The Dallas Morning News

“Impressive. . . . Eloquent . . . Pesce is a master at distilling complex ideas down to their most important elements and explaining them in layman’s terms.”
–Salon.com

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 340 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books; 1 edition (October 3, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345439430
• ISBN-13: 978-0345439437
• Product Dimensions: 5.7 x 1 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,453,918 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Toys Lead to Simulations Lead to Web-Based Problem Solving!, October 23, 2000

By 

Donald Mitchell "Jesus Loves You!" (Thanks for Providing My Reviews over 109,000 Helpful Votes Globally) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Playful World: How Technology Is Transforming Our Imagination (Hardcover)

This book clearly deserves far more than five stars.

Your imagination will be stimulated by this book . . . perhaps even more than by any other book you will read this year.

The book begins innocently enough by explaining some of the newest technologies that are affecting toys and games. You begin with Furby, an interactive toy that "comes alive" and requires care. Furby can learn language, and responds to its owner.

Next comes Lego's Mindstorms kit for making robots. These toys have a computer in them that allow them use sensors to take purposeful actions. Soon, adults were writing software for this so you could program in more actions.

You move on from there to see how these toys are built around a model of how children learn, by trial and error. Simulations then become a powerful technology for helping create more capable learners, by accelerating that learning process. You are introduced to a new product, the Sony Play Station 2, which will offer simulations with learning capabilities in complex games.

Then, the author takes to off into the Web and points out that youngsters are sharing their experiences with Furby, robots, and simulation games so that they all learn faster.

You begin to see the possibilities of a whole different paradigm for learning, that will proceed much faster and advance both individual and human development in more fundamental ways. This could be the big payoff from information technology.

He then takes you over the rainbow into the future with the potential of next generation toys and technologies. Virtual reality will be at full potential with the next generation of Playstation in 2005. Electron microscopes will allow us to peer routinely and inexpensively at the atomic level. Nanotechnology will have developed to allow us to manipulate atoms and molecules to create molecular machines.

If you then create convergence of artificial intelligence, robotics, virtual reality, and the Internet, you can have a society where the most advanced problems can be attacked simultaneously by hundreds of millions of people sharing their experiences and insights. That's where he lets your imagination take over.

Obviously, the potential for good and harm is magnified in such an area. The harm can come from overdeveloping technology without putting in sufficient limitations required to overcome its potential dangers.

I prefer to focus on the good. I hope you will, too. Although the author exhorts us to encourage our children in this area while upholding important human values, I think that we need to get involved with the new technology, too. Playing with your child is good for you both! It's also going to be even more fun for you, with these neat new capabilities. Your child can teach you how to use them!

Here's how the book leaves it: "If we fail to listen to our own children, how can we expect them to listen to us when we try to teach them of older, but still essential, human values?"

Whatever you conclude about where this technology convergence will lead us, I encourage you to become familiar with these toys and technologies. Simulations are a terrific way to advance learning for adults as well as children. The sooner you understand the potential, the sooner you and your peers can make faster progress.

Enjoy a more knowledgeable future!

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Nuts & Bolts View of Technological Transformation, October 9, 2000

By 

Panopticonman "panopticonman" (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Playful World: How Technology Is Transforming Our Imagination (Hardcover)

Good account of today's interactive toys, where they come from, and where they're going in the near term. It's always dangerous to predict how technology will modify our ontological horizons and Pesce, to his credit, doesn't push to hard on predictions, or engage in too much utopian dreaming. He resolutely focuses on explaining in layman's terms how advances in Artificial Intelligence are finding their way into toys. He also looks at nanotechnology and considers its implications. A self-admitted techie, he ventures into the predictive mode only where he has some empirical evidence to support his case. For instance he cites a study conducted by Sherry Turkle at MIT among kids who owned "interactive" pets like Furby which found that these kids did not classify these pets as either or alive or not alive but rather as some third category of object.

There will be implications for our children deriving from this new category of object, Pesce states, but doesn't take it much further than that. For instance, one might ask will this new category of object somehow work to erase the line between machine and humanity, to blur the boundary between our bodies and technology, a boundary already blurred by the objectification of the body in consumer culture? Will the difficulties encountered in making and refining this third class of artificially intelligent object help us to form a more complete understanding of the capabilities and capacities of humanity? Is that something we want to do? Why? Why are the dystopian implications of such technology always more compelling of our attention than the utopian implications?

These are questions that are really not within the stated scope of the book. But, of course, these are the most interesting questions.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Toys that make you go "aha", June 19, 2003

By 

K. Sampanthar "Inventor of ThinkCube" (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Playful World: How Technology Is Transforming Our Imagination (Hardcover)

This is a book I wish I had written. When I picked up this book, I was amazed at how many subjects Mark covered that I was interested in too. Everything from Lego Mindstorms, Eric Drexler's Nanotechnology, Richard Feynman's talk on "More room at the bottom" that was the inspiration for Nanotechnology and many more. This book covers so much ground and describes many very interesting ideas and technologies. Pesce was the designer of VRML, Virtual Reality Modeling Language, which enables web pages to display 3D scenes and has been involved in the forefront of emerging technology for a while, so he is very qualified to give us the whirlwind tour of these "Mind Toys".

He takes off from where Seymour Papert's Mindstorms left us with technologies that create toys that help us to develop our mental models of the world. Toys that make us think.

As a generation of children grow up playing with Lego Mindstorms, Furbys, AIBO's etc.. they will develop their mental faculties that will come into play as they define the future.

I grew up with a BBC micro and started programming adventure games in BASIC, which opened up a whole new world to me. As a generation we played computer games while growing up. These were rich interactive environments that left us feeling unchallenged in a schooling system, which was still geared towards to old teaching techniques. These techniques seemed totally inadequate in coping with children who could solve complex mathematical problems at home whilst programming. So I am not sure how the schools of today handle children who are building robots and playing with toys that they can not only interact with, but ones which can learn and change as they are interacted with.

Do we need to change the way we approach education? Instead of complaining that children have MTV (Short) attention spans, we should be creating an education system that can cope with the speed at which these young minds are working at. I think we should be encouraging children to be thinking faster and day dreaming and using their imaginations, instead of trying to get them to fit an out dated model that will leave them totally unprepared for an ever more complex world.

I digress, but these are thoughts that come to mind while reading this book, as you whisked off on this tour of future mind toys.

If you can't tell, I love this book! Anyone interested in toys that can help them or their children think, should read this book.