Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World

by Steven Johnson

Toys and games are the preludes to serious ideas. —CHARLES EAMES

Somehow, after all those years, Babbage found his way to the auction and purchased the dancer for thirty-five pounds. He refurbished the machine and put it on display in his Marylebone town house, a few feet away from the Difference Engine. In a sense, the two machines belonged to different centuries: the dancer was the epitome of Enlightenment-era fantasy; the Difference Engine an augur of late twentieth-century computation.

When human beings create and share experiences designed to delight or amaze, they often end up transforming society in more dramatic ways than people focused on more utilitarian concerns.

Brian Eno’s definition of culture as “all the things we don’t have to do.”)

Because play is often about breaking rules and experimenting with new conventions, it turns out to be the seedbed for many innovations that ultimately develop into much sturdier and more significant forms.

You will find the future wherever people are having the most fun.

The craze for cotton was so severe that by the first decade of the next century it triggered a kind of moral panic among the rising commentariat, accompanied by a series of parliamentary interventions. Hundreds if not thousands of pamphlets and essays were published, many of them denouncing the “Calico Madams” whose scandalous taste for cotton was undermining the British economy.

The traditional explanation held that cotton conquered Europe thanks to its intrinsic virtues as a textile and to its price. Yet the historian John Styles has demonstrated that cotton failed to penetrate a true mass market until well into the nineteenth century, and was generally more expensive than the rival products of wool and linen. What set cotton apart was not practical matters of cost and comfort but rather the more ethereal trends of fashion.

When historians have gone back to wrestle with the question of why the industrial revolution happened, when they have tried to define the forces that made it possible, their eyes have been drawn to more familiar culprits on the supply side: technological innovations that increased industrial productivity, the expansion of credit networks and financing structures; insurance markets that took significant risk out of global shipping channels. But the frivolities of shopping have long been considered a secondary effect of the industrial revolution itself, an effect, not a cause; a cultural appetite that wouldn’t be whetted until the rise of nineteenth-century department stores like Le Bon Marché and Macy’s. According to the standard theory, industrialization created mechanical processes that greatly reduced the cost of manufacturing and transporting goods, and built up a base of upper-middle-class citizens with enough spare cash to drop on the niceties—which then led to the birth of consumerism. But the Calico Madams suggest that the standard theory is, at the very least, more complicated than that: the “agreeable amusements” of shopping most likely came first, and set the thunderous chain of industrialization into motion with their seemingly trivial pursuits.

The story of calico and chintz is a chilling reminder that the amusements of life have often triggered some of the worst atrocities in history.

In the late 1950s, Gruen gave a speech in which he denounced the banal landscapes of the postwar suburbs, calling them “avenues of horror . . . flanked by the greatest collection of vulgarity—billboards, motels, gas stations, shanties, car lots, miscellaneous industrial equipment, hot dog stands, wayside stores—ever collected by mankind.”

The spectacle of the mall courtyard, and its pedestrian convenience, was for Gruen a way to smuggle European metropolitan values into a barbaric American suburban wasteland.

Gruen would eventually renounce his creation, or at least the distorted version of it that the mall developers had implemented: “I refuse to pay alimony,” he proclaimed, “for these bastard developments.”

One of the reasons the critics raved over Gruen’s original Southdale Center was the simple fact that no one had seen a space like that before, particularly in suburban Minnesota. But as the developers standardized Gruen’s original plan, and as the big chain stores grew more powerful, malls became interchangeable: a characterless cocoon of J.Crew and the Body Shop and Bloomingdale’s. They were not quite “avenues of horror” but something equally soulless: avenues of sameness. Eventually, our appetite for novelty and surprise overcame the convenience and ubiquity of mall culture, and people began turning back to the old downtowns.

It seems preposterous to say it, but one of the key events that brought an end to the Dutch financial empire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a one-armed Frenchman stealing a handful of seeds halfway around the globe.

Europeans, as it turned out, had it exactly wrong about spices. They weren’t protection against the Black Death. They were the reason the Black Death came to Europe in the first place.

At some point in the distant past, the ancestors of that tarantula hit upon a survival strategy that involved simulating intense, painful heat with their venom. Today, the Frito-Lay corporation sells billions of dollars’ worth of snack foods that rely on the exact same biochemical channels to create the perception of heat. When you taste that Doritos chip, you are receiving a signal that evolution has been crafting for millions of years, a signal with a simple, universal message: “Fire!” And here’s the amazing thing: we took that signal and turned it into something enjoyable and unthreatening, something we eat for fun.

For Snow White, Disney hit upon the idea of multiple layers corresponding to different points in the virtual space of the movie, and separating those cels physically from each other while filming them: one layer for the characters in the foreground, one for a cottage behind them, another for the trees behind the cottage, and so on. By moving the position of the camera in tiny increments for each frame, a parallax effect could be simulated, creating an illusion of depth even more profound than the one Brunelleschi had invented five hundred years before.

In just nine years, Disney and his team had transformed a quaint illusion—the dancing mouse is whistling!—into an expressive form so vivid and realistic that it could bring people to tears. Disney and his team had created the ultimate illusion: fictional characters created by hand, etched onto celluloid, and projected at twenty-four frames per second, that were somehow so believably human that it was almost impossible not to feel empathy for them.

You can hear beneath that formal syntax the guttural cry of moral panic that would echo for centuries every time new leisure spaces emerged to scandalize older generations: from the department stores of the nineteenth century, to the pool halls of the early twentieth, to the video-game arcades of the 1980s.

Scenes that today evoke grandeur and awe were in many cases abhorrent to a seventeenth-century eye, at least among the Europeans who were educated enough to record their impressions. Mountains in particular were thought to be aesthetically offensive. They were called “warts,” “boils,” and even in one bizarre case “nature’s pudenda.” As late as the eighteenth century, travelers through the Alps would often ask to be blindfolded to avoid looking at the awful scenery.

While human beings seem to have an innate fondness for natural greenery—what E. O. Wilson famously called biophilia—that deep-rooted instinct appears to have been overpowered by ten thousand years of agricultural and urban settlements. Wilderness back then was something to conquer, not contemplate.

(The character of Carl Denham in King Kong was cast from the mold that Hagenbeck first created.) Hagenbeck truly was an inveterate traveler, averaging more than thirty thousand miles in a year—the equivalent of ten flights across the Atlantic. In the age of trains and steamships, that was a staggering amount of time on the road. But Hagenbeck did almost none of the actual animal capture himself; instead, he ran a vertically integrated system that stretched from trappers in sub-Saharan Africa to the showrooms and expositions that Hagenbeck began establishing across Europe and the United States. Wild-animal trader has an undeniably buff ring to it as a job description, but in the end Hagenbeck’s success was largely due to his skills at supply chain management.

The world is a more interesting place because there are coffeehouses and national parks and IMAX theaters in it; we should celebrate the people behind those institutions the way we celebrate and study high-tech innovators or political revolutionaries.

One of the defining characteristics of games—as opposed to, say, narrative—is precisely the fact that they turn out differently every time we play them; games are novelty machines.