BOOK
Mark Pesce, like hypermedia's guru Ted Nelson, is one of those fascinating visionaries who contributes as much to the culture of imagination as to technology itself. With The Playful World, Pesce shows how today's digitized, networked smart toys serve as the precursor to tomorrow's mutable fast-forward reality. According to Pesce, we should pay attention to nominal playthings like Sony's PlayStation2, Lego's programmable Mindstorm robots, and cuddly interactive plush dolls like Furby, especially if we want to control this future.
Pesce, creator of virtual reality modeling language and until recently the chair of USC's Interactive Media program, brought us VRML-ized Web pages in 3-D, but he's also been driven to evangelize for the future he hopes ubiquitous computing, virtual reality, and nanotechnology can offer. The Playful World is best when Pesce integrates narratives of MIT legends such as cybernetician Norbert Wiener and nanotech pioneer K. Eric Drexler with analyses of successful and innovative off-the-shelf tech toys. Mindstorm bots, for example, derive directly from work done by Mitchell Resnick's lab at MIT; Resnick was mentored there by Seymour Papert; and Papert in turn was influenced by Jean Piaget. Pesce envisions Resnick's prototypes and the Lego toys they spawned as a perfect training ground for the nanotech engineering that will inevitably flow from Drexler's research.
It's a book unfailingly hopeful, if not always well argued. Many of Pesce's biographical portraits are flat for their lack of criticism, and The Playful World could use more structure: Digressions on everything from Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the Web to artist Char Davies' VR installations to Pesce's own adventures in technology don't really push the book's provocative thesis.
Readers unacquainted with Pesce's mystical interests will be surprised at the techgnostic tinge of his prognostications. In this utopian account, toys themselves help children build perceptual schema, conceptual tools, and even ethical values to confront a future in which objects "can be made and unmade according to the heart's desire." Even if you're not (and I'm not) ready to accept Teilhard de Chardin's notion of a noospheric global consciousness, Pesce's enthusiasm for what our children will make of this convergent world is a millennial tonic.
The Playful World: How Technology Is Transforming Our Imagination by Mark Pesce: $24. Ballantine: www.playfulworld.com.
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