The Playful World: How Technology Is Transforming Our Imagination

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

Product Description
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.

For an example, Pesce devotes _multiple_ chapters to discussing the Furby. He, himself, acknowledges the blisteringly fast pace of technology, so it is not suprising that his detailed account of the creation and marketing of this toy is tragically trite and (to use the word as unsnobbishly as possible) passe.

After enduring these first chapters I hoped the book might address more general aspects of technology, but instead it becomes a personal travelogue of Pesce's (not the least bit compelling) contributions to cyberspace. If he relayed these events with the perceptive knack of modern historians, his anecdotes might prove worthwhile, but instead they read like a desperate attempt of his "trying to find a place for himself" in the story of the development of modern technology.

This book brought me very few new perspectives and even fewer new facts. I strongly discourage anyone from investing time or money into this book if you're approaching it with the objectives I did.


BECOME A CHILD AGAIN AND DISCOVER YOU   July 20, 2003
Joyce Schwarz (Marina Del Rey, CA USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

"The Playful World" is a fascinating tome by author Mark Pesce, one of the foremost practical techno wizards of our time. The creator of VRML (virtual reality mark-up language) Pesce's visions are creating a new immersive society and info-mediaries for today and tomorrow. Pesce helps you learn how to pretend again-- how to make believe and use those skills to build new bridges to the future whether you're involved in tech or whether you just want to understand the next generation of anything -- people, places and things. Pesce tackles tough topics and adds an amusing presentation to help you understand such concepts as distributed intelligence, engineered structures and yes, toys.
Pesce maintains it started with the FURBY -- you remember those little gremlin like creatures form Tiger Electronics a few holiday seasons ago don't you? He says they are the beginning of being able to embody human intelligence into the machine world (at least the beginning of what we can see on our store shelves). IA -- intelligence augmented is probably more likely than AI artificial intelligence but as our devices get smarter and our phones know where are kids and colleagues are, it's comforting to think that you can learn to USE technology not have it replace YOU!. Pesce is optimistic that the new 'synthetic worlds will create a gateway to a living planet'. It's all just a few years ahead-- this book will serve as a bridge of knowledge to tomorrow and make you think about ordinary objects in extraordinary ways.


Toys that make you go "aha"   June 19, 2003
K. Sampanthar (Boston, MA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful

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.


eye-opening   April 10, 2003
David Group (Buffalo, NY)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

The Playful World is a fascinating look at the future of computers and nanotechnology, and of wonders which may very well come to pass in the next decade or so (If Moore's Law continues to hold true, by 2012 we'll have reached the atomic level, and there will be supercomputers the size of a grain of sand). Pesce has been involved in the forefront of some of these advances, so he knows his stuff, and his enthusiasm for the potentials of this field is evident throughout the book. If the book has a fault, it is that he downplays or ignores the dangers inherent in the use of this technology, e.g., what's to prevent someone from releasing "spy dust", or clouds of nano-cameras, into an area, or billions of nano-surgeons to lobotomize an entire population? This book may be nothing new for those already immersed in the computer field, but for anyone else, it is required reading.