Simon

Simon is an ongoing research project exploring the narrative space between digital collaboration and digital antagonism. The outputs of this project include interfaces, instruments, and games, along with a series of performances with a computer program named Simon.

Simon, one of the first handheld computer games, was released in 1978 and quickly became the most popular game in the United States, selling over one million units well before Christmas. It would go on to become Milton Bradley’s top selling game of all time, bringing in tens of millions in annual revenue for the next decade. Simon became an 80s icon, remained popular through the 90s, and is still in production today, 35 years later.

The story of Simon is entangled with the dawn of a digital age where smaller, faster computers radically changed both work and play. It inspired other sound and memory games—Merlin, Bob- It, Follow-Me, Space Echo, Copy Cat, and Loopz are all direct descendants—but Simon’s influence moved well beyond the realms of play. Encoded in the flashing patterns of sound and light was a feedback loop. As children copied Simon, Simon became part of how we think. Simon has memory. He is always one step ahead of us…

From a 1978 tv ad:

Simon sets the pace. You follow right along.
Light the lights that Simon lights or he’ll tell you that you’re wrong.

Simon’s a computer. Simon has a brain.
You either do what Simon says, or else go down the drain.

Simon is a master. He tells you what to do.
but you can master Simon if you follow every clue.

Simon has a brain. He is named, gendered, and unpredictable. To master him, you follow his rules. He shames you when you lose and congratulates you if you win. He operates on different levels and when ignored, he reminds you to turn him off. He’s simple, but inside is a program that conjures both fascination and anxiety—the double-take of artificial life.

Although Simon was cast to play the part of the robot adversary, his brightly colored plastic interface lacks the detail and surface complexity to resolve as the enemy. The low resolution, abstract gameplay is too simple and unpredictable. His memories aren’t specific and so they don’t resolve as the memories of another.

Simon plays in a different uncanny valley, determined not by the realistic complexity of the surface but through the durational interplay of a system that appears almost thoughtful. In Simon, we find ourselves.

From Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud...

In casting Simon as the enemy, Milton Bradley was working from an out-of-date manual. Skepticism and paranoia dominated the technological discourses of the mid-60s and continued through most of the 70s, a time of social and political unrest that resonated more with a return to nature than trajectories of scientific and technical conquest. But as microprocessors allowed for complex digital circuits to be enclosed within familiar interfaces, electronic products became intuitive, practical and affordable.

For children, Simon was more than just a toy. He was a friend, a touchable machine at a time when keyboards were off limits. While parents tried to communicate with their Apple II in symbols and codes, their small children were pushing giant glowing buttons, ‘repeating Simon’s flashing lights and sounds’. In escaping the productivity proposed by personal computers and focusing on tactile low-resolution patterns, children came to explore less predictable dimensions of the digital world. No longer just tools—computers became collaborators and teammates, then experiences unto themselves, not “wonderfully functional, but functionally wonderful—a merry- go-round of light, color, and music.”

In the quote above, Vivian Sobchack describes the UFO from Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, released in 1977. The film played a large role in Simon’s success. The final scene features a team of scientists communicating with a giant, brightly illuminated spaceship through a sequence of synchronized lights and sounds. The interplay is similar in both behaviour and design to Simon’s flashing tones and flying-saucer shaped appearance.

In the film, a vacuum cleaner moves across a room on its own and an oven repeatedly cycles on and off. Cars, mechanical systems and electronic gadgets are brought to life by a mysterious power. Cameras, microphones, digital tape decks and other recording technologies make frequent cameos. Electronic gadgets are present in nearly every scene, referenced with both a paranoid and idolizing obsession that suggests the presence of a different kind of being. Are we looking for aliens or systems born of our own minds and hands? Are they real or do we make them real?

Simon became the handheld controller for communicating with another life form, worshipped with cult-like fervor. With their mechanisms hidden, objects of our own design became life-like and magical. Animated devices, simultaneously depicted as both friend and foe, were worshipped with cult-like intensity. Both Close Encounters and Simon became iconographic agents of a nascent digital aesthetic, shaping popular perspectives that led to a new-wave of cybernetics that defined 80s culture—the pulsing, boldly-textured patterns of sound and light.

“It's incredible that Milton Bradley could have gotten hold of a microprocessor and come up with something that dumb." …”you have to make the computer dumb and slow," says an electronic game inventor, "for people to be able to play with it.”

~ Boston Magazine

Simon’s brain is the TMS 1000 “computer on a chip”, the first ever microcontroller, a 4-bit single-chip CPU with 32 bytes of RAM developed by Texas Instruments in 1971 and commercialized in 1974. Microchip developments made computers practical and affordable and with the release of the Commodore 64 in 1982, digital computing entered the home. Small, cheap microcontrollers like the TMS 1000 changed the face of countless industries, and, outfitted with embeddable logic chips, the game industry went electric. A 1978 article in Boston Magazine, “Electronic Shock in Toyland”, outlines some of the new capabilities of digital games.

Because of its ability to endow a game with memory, the computer has transformed their notion of what a game is: by providing random variables that dice cannot; by making play cheat-proof, since the computer neither lies nor can be lied to; by adding an "intelligent" opponent, which radically redefines the concept of solitaire games.

~ Boston Magazine

The availability of microcontrollers was the driving force behind the industry’s shift to handheld digital systems, and, while video-games would quickly come to dominate the entertainment market, standalone electronic games were popular as well. By the late 80’s, digital systems—hand-held interfaces (Simon, Merlin), arcade games (Space Invaders, Pong), dedicated videogame consoles (Atari 2600), and the infinitely reprogrammable personal computer (Apple II, Commodore 64)—had become the primary sites of play, advertising not only new experiences but new modes of life (social networking, virtual reality, networked gaming).

The promise of the digital extended well beyond play. With small, cheap, easily programmable chips and fast connection protocols, computers could sense, model and process the physical world in close to ‘real-time’. With the bit as a common denominator, information was to be free from material limits, and, sold on this vision, people increasingly turned their attention to the glow of the virtual—the techno-utopian optimism of Richard Brautigan’s 1967 poem “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.”

I like to think (and

the sooner the better!)

of a cybernetic meadow

where mammals and computers

live together in mutually

programming harmony

like pure water

touching clear sky.

I like to think

(right now, please!)

of a cybernetic forest

filled with pines and electronics

where deer stroll peacefully

past computers

as if they were flowers

with spinning blossoms.

I like to think

(it has to be!)

of a cybernetic ecology

where we are free of our labors

and joined back to nature,

returned to our mammal

brothers and sisters,

and all watched over

by machines of loving grace.

The promise of a digital future radiated from both Silicon Valley and Hollywood, spreading with ever-increasing resolution—life free from identity, difference and body. But the digital was promoted and produced by people positioned to profit from its realization and a cast of mostly white, male tech-entrepreneurs with military contracts saw financial opportunity in digitizing life and built systems to control its currency, information.

As the promise of freedom was manufactured into increasingly directed systems and sold as productivity machines, the virtual came to reflect the real. ‘Digital freedom’ resembled a more efficient version of an all too human logic. Often overlooked in the spectacle of animated technologies, people catalyze the entangled influences that perpetually remake what both ‘human’ and ‘technology’ mean. People are specific, varied and noisy and only in their hands and minds do machines become more—extensions of life. Alan Perlis describes the computer program in the forward of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, the basis of MIT's computer science courses since 1980:

Every computer program is a model, hatched in the mind, of a real or mental process.These processes, arising from human experience and thought, are huge in number, intricate in detail, and at any time only partially understood. They are modeled to our permanent satisfaction rarely by our computer programs. Thus even though our programs are carefully handcrafted discrete collections of symbols, mosaics of interlocking functions, they continually evolve: we change them as our perception of the model deepens, enlarges, generalizes until the model ultimately attains a metastable place within still another model with which we struggle.24

: Alan J. Perlis, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (Forward)

Our technologies are processes abstracted from the human mind. From the Greek “technic”, a method or manner of accomplishing something, technology is not only a description of technical devices but a method for formalizing and systemizing human processes. By using our technical devices we develop new perspectives that help us build new technical devices and the concept ‘human’ is remade at an exponential pace. The rapid refiguring of both human and machine is perhaps what makes people seem different from other forms of life. But what are technologies used for, ultimately? Creating better worlds? Producing new patterns? Or are they simply something to do? Something to keep people productive.

New technology doubles as both savior and captor, a confusion illustrated in the lines outside Apple stores and the real blood on technology’s ‘bleeding edge’. It is the dualism at play in countless science fictions—a simultaneity and a genre that all technical projects move within. People make instruments that change the way people work and in working with them, people are changed. A cup lets its inventor live further from water but, living further from water, the inventor needs a cup. This feedback system is found throughout history—humans making systems making humans.

In time and with use people have come to incorporate the silicon perspective as part of the carbon consciousness. The microcontroller, capable of performing aspects of human logic, works bi-directionally. As people copy systems, systems copy people. An iPhone is a perspective, just like a cup. When people are copies, they are easy to control.