Games People Play: 1977

Smart little computers provide mental aerobics Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding!" The sound of a fire bell, imitated flawlessly and gleefully by a high-pitched human voice, informs the neighborhood that Moppet has conquered Machine. They are well matched: Lizie is small, going on eleven, with brightly lit hazel eyes. The vanquished mechanism is a small desktop computer called Comp IV, new this year at under $40, with flashing red lights.

Comp IV starts things off by thinking of-- but not revealing -- a number, and its human opponent tries to work out the secret by punching pushbuttons. Milton Bradley Co., which makes the gadget, supplies scratch pads for adults and slow-witted children, but self-respecting eleven-year-olds disdain these. The girl also does not bother with the relatively easy three-and four-digit problems. She plays at the rarefied five-digit level, which means she must hit on one out of a possible 30,240 combinations, and she keeps her notes in her head, the way the computer does.

She skips across the living room to where her father is playing chess. "Watch this," he says, stabbing furiously at a keyboard. He is 26 moves into a grim queen's gambit saber duel with Chess Challenger, a $275 computerized overachiever built by Fidelity Electronics, Ltd. The machine is playing at the highest of its three levels, claimed in some ads to equal 1650, the rating of an average club player (the estimate is too generous). It has occurred to the father that it could be a great improvement, in the interest of strict fairness, if the computer had an aperture down which martinis could be poured. The valiant human attacker has such an aperture. Nevertheless he has forced a crack in the dreaded robot's pawn fortress, and he sends his queen slashing in, punching "H3 to H6" and the encode button on the keyboard. The red light-emitting diodes of the machine's digital display flicker for about 30 seconds.

"He's really sweating," says the father, sensing the kill. Lizie scowls. "How do you know it's a he?" But now the sweating is over,and the checkmated computer weeps a bright red tear: "I lose." "Right, it's a he," says Lizie.

A great many Americans are discovering this Christmas that sending a computer to the showers in bitter defeat swells human self-esteem in a wonderfully satisfying way (and losing to the wretched thing raises the dark suspicion that humanity's number may be up). Stores are full of computer games--or, in some cases, are sold out of items like Parker Bros.' Code Name: Sector (up to $50), in which the computer plays the part of a hunted submarine, and Milton Bradley's bleeping, buzzing Electronic Battleship (also up to $50)--and customers trying to buy them. Games are the most important segment of the toy market. Manufacturers are expected to gross some $450 million in 1977, up 10% from the previous year. Last season TV action games of the Pong variety were the electronic craze, and manufacturers Fairchild and Atari are back on the market with more versatile and more expensive cassette models.

But this is the year of the digital readout. In addition to Comp IV and Chess Challenger, two or three dozen other computer games have made the familiar 20th century progression from marvel to household commonplace (though their prices are not commonplace; Gammonmaster II, a backgammon computer that resembles Chess Challenger, costs $199.50).

Pushing buttons and getting readouts, clearly enough, is the new national sport. One of the amiable underground truths of corporate America is that virtually every office computer in the country is programmed (at the huge and hidden cost of many hundreds of hours of expert time) with some version of a Star Trek game. Obviously the manufacturers of Electronic Battleship and the rest of the Christmas doodads are beginning to mine this rich lode of mania.

Circuitry more complicated than the electronic kind is at work, however. More than ever, the U.S. is a nation of game players. The most notable of the games being played are not mere social lubricants, and they are too difficult to be dismissed as mindless time fillers. There may be a parallel with the new enthusiasm for distance running, cross-country skiing and the other citizens' sports that require enormous effort and seem absurd to unbelievers.

Some of the games now filtering into the general consciousness are distance runs indeed, taking anything from several hours to several months to play, and requiring formidable Sitzfleisch (German for sitting flesh). They leave the mind feeling exactly the way the body does after a ten-mile run, wrung out but exhilarated. Call this sort of game playing mental aerobics.

Or call it a childish waste of time, as do most of the friends, parents, colleagues and mates of the addicts. Game players have accomplices, but they do not have sympathizers. It may be for this reason that they are so likely to form warm little subcultures, or termite nests, within the larger society, complete with their own lingo, legends, heroes, magazines, newspapers and meetings of the clan. Hardcore bridge and chess players have nested with their own kind for some time, and in the last couple of years backgammon has become so widespread a craze that now serious players need take no notice of the real world. (Backgammon is unlike most other demanding mental games in that it is played seriously only for money and because, like bridge, it appeals to women as well as men.)

The Japanese board game Go reached the U.S. as a fad a few years ago and now has developed its own cadre of players, many of them convinced that it is far more profound than chess. Another board-and-counter game, Othello, sells well enough to indicate that its termites are nesting. Master Mind, a code-breaking game devised by an Israeli cryptanalyst, has its own fanatics. From Rumanian Jews in Israel comes a kind of gin rummy played with tiles, variously called Rummi-brick and Rummikub; one manufacturer in Korea has picked up the game and expects to ship 100,000 by the year's end to sell at up to $40 a set. And the Scrabble Crossword Game, thought to be a children's diversion only by those who have not been thrashed by a ZYGOTE-wielding expert, sells briskly in seven languages, at $19 for the plastic-coated board with turntable base, and supports a bimonthly newspaper and some 55 clubs across the nation. Fans of new board games called Lie Cheat & Steal and Seduction (sample hazard: "Remove an article of clothing and stimulate the person you are pursuing") so far have not formed leagues.

Baseball reduces well to a game with a playing board, dice and statistics--it is virtually motionless even in real life--and the best of several versions, its adherents insist, is Stratomatic Baseball. To make the game more realistic, the strengths and weaknesses of real baseballers were fed into a computer by the designers. These in turn affect the strengths and weaknesses of Stratomatic players; one scholar at Atlanta's Emory University punched his fist through two windows last year after losing at Stratomatic. New York teenager Chris Boeth can play a solitaire game in about 13 minutes, he reports. That is fast; still... "Let's see, there's 162 games in a regular season. And, of course, 26 teams in the two leagues ..." It works out to 57 eight-hour days of living-room baseball a year. "Except that when I play with my father, it takes longer, so it's probably more."

There are game players in ruffled evening shirts and game players in Fonzie T shirts, and why they put in all of that time is something they do not analyze or talk about much. If they are pressed, though, some will admit that it is for the human contact, at a distance, on their own terms. And to reassure themselves each day that they have not slipped.

Jim Dunnigan's ruling motive is different; he uses games to collect, sift and pass on information. He is a bald and bony 34-year-old with a quick mind and a quick mouth, and he is one of the nation's two leading designers and publishers of war games. Simulations Publications, Inc. (SPI), the firm he started seven years ago, does incredibly complex recreations of such historical battles as Waterloo, Agincourt, Gettysburg, and sells them at the rate of about $2 million worth a year. Avalon Hill Game Co., the other big manufacturer, markets such simulations as Starship Troopers, a science-fiction game, and the complex tank-warfare re-creation Tobruk. Dunnigan's firm also imagines wars that have not yet happened: the one between the Soviets and the Chinese, the Canadian civil war, the invasion of America. The Pentagon buys Dunnigan's games, he says (and presumably plays with his maps and dice and cardboard counters), and so do the CIA and the Soviet embassy. Hobbyists gather every week at the Compleat Strategist, a Manhattan shop specializing in war-game paraphernalia, to play out SPI and Avalon Hill battles with divisions of 25-mm. toy soldiers.

Dunnigan wants to use games for teaching. His customers, almost all of whom are male, want war, but he has bigger ideas. A recent SPI game is called A Mighty Fortress, and it is nothing less than a re-forming of the Reformation. Play the Pope cleverly, and roll your dice right, and Martin Luther becomes a minor malcontent known only to historians. Dunnigan's buyers are lean and hungry; their rooms are sandbagged with history books. "Games are one step beyond print!" he says, very excited by this idea. "You travel in a paper time machine that lands you in the middle of the event!"

Dunnigan's largest war game is World War II, which includes nine maps that cover 45 sq. ft. It can take almost as long to play as it did to fight. The least warlike is After the Holocaust, designed around the premise that the U.S. has been sundered by an atomic war into four weak and competing regions. The regions are so impoverished that a war is unlikely to be profitable. The way to win is to cooperate, a concept that is unsettling to most game players.

The SPI shop markets some 170 games, the latest of which is a Tolkien imagining called War of the Ring. For $20 the Hobbit fancier gets three large maps of Middle Earth, and a densely printed 28-page rulebook with instructions like "To attempt Citadel Reduction, the Dark Power Player must expend one Shadow Point for each Nazgul present in the hex."

The Tolkien fantasy is by no means the most complex monster rally available; a small Wisconsin firm called TSR Hobbies Inc. sells a bewildering three-volume manual for a mind game called Dungeons & Dragons, whose object is to wrest treasure from the loathsome beings that guard it. The game involves a dungeon of six or more descending levels drawn on graph paper and includes such monsters as Balrogs, Purple Worms, Giant Leeches, Nixies, Griffons and Invisible Stalkers. Players take the characters of men, hobbits, elves or dwarfs and fight or hunt treasure according to elaborate rules: "The charisma score is usable to decide such things as whether a witch capturing a player will turn him into a swine or keep him enchanted as a lover." One game in Cambridge, Mass., played every Saturday by members of M.I.T.'s Strategic Games Society, has gone on since spring and search teams have explored only three levels of the labyrinth cooked up by Dungeon Master Bob Ruppert. It took Ruppert, who in his less real life is an insurance salesman, an entire year to perfect his dungeon. "It's a lot of work being the dungeon master," he says, "and you have to play all the monsters, too. I like to give them a lot of style."

If playing the game is the thing for most people, there are a driven few who have bigger dreams: creating new games. "Inventors send us everything from a finished model to an idea sketched on the back of a paper bag," says Jack McMahon, head of the development group for Parker Bros., the big Massachusetts game manufacturer responsible for Monopoly, that company's alltime bestseller. A couple of years ago an extraordinary little group managed to get a shoe in Parker Bros.' door: a Cambridge astronomer named Robert Doyle, his wife Holly, an astrophysicist who taught at Harvard, and her brother Wendl Thomis, a New York computer software expert. They had given themselves a name, Microcosmos, like a rock group, and what was more interesting, they had an idea: the use of computers in games. Invited back, they brought a working model of the gadget that became Code Name: Sector. Doyle wants to make a million dollars so he can afford to write books on astronomy and invent on the side.

Wondrous as they are, the new games are not without their flaws. Code Name: Sector, the submarine chase, has a dandy digital readout, for instance, but the courses of the sub and the pursuing warships must be drawn on a chart with a wax crayon--which, as all twelve-year-olds will recognize, is not exactly state-of-the-art technology. Comp IV and Chess Challenger are not quite smart enough to bamboozle a good human player; Gammonmaster II plays its roles well but was rushed onto the market without a doubling cube (though one is in the works); Electronic Battleship, while physically impressive and wonderfully noisy, lacks an AC adapter to help preserve batteries and as a game is not quite as interesting (because ships can't be placed on diagonals) as the traditional paper-and-pencil battleship game.

Never mind these quibbles; the year of the microprocessor has given game players the best present of all, an opponent who can be kept in a dresser drawer. What is on the way is not hard to guess: in a couple of years the game player's best friend will be the full-scale home computer.

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