We Live in the Future WarGames Imagined
I watched WarGames with my son on a Friday night. He had never seen it. I hadn’t seen it in probably twenty years. The movie was the same. The world wasn’t.
It was around nine o’clock on a Friday night, which is usually about the time I start thinking I should have gone to bed an hour ago.
My son and I were talking about AI.
I don’t remember exactly how we got there, but somewhere in the conversation I mentioned WarGames.
“You’ve seen WarGames, right?”
He hadn’t.
I couldn’t believe it at first, then realized there was no particular reason he should have. The movie came out in 1983.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen it either. More than fifteen years ago, certainly. Maybe more than twenty.
“You want to watch it?”
It was Friday night.
Why not.
Shall we play a game?
I remembered the broad strokes.
Matthew Broderick. Modem. NORAD. A computer named Joshua. Global Thermonuclear War.
And, of course:
“A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”
What I didn’t remember was how well the movie still works.
Some old movies require a little cooperation. You forgive the pacing. You explain something that made perfect sense in 1983. You quietly ignore the part that didn’t age particularly well.
WarGames didn’t need much help.
We just watched it.
The technology is obviously old. David Lightman connects to other computers by putting a telephone handset into an acoustic coupler. He searches for computers by dialing telephone numbers one after another. Information that would take seconds to find today requires libraries, newspaper clippings and actual detective work.
But none of that made the movie feel obsolete.
If anything, the old technology made what happened next feel stranger.
Because sitting there in 2026, I realized we were watching the movie from the other side.
The future arrived
In 1983, talking to a computer was science fiction.
Not typing commands into one. Computers already did that.
Talking with one.
David types to Joshua.
Joshua responds.
He asks it questions. It asks him questions. It calls him back. It plays games with him. Eventually, David stops treating it like a piece of software and starts interacting with it like something on the other end of a conversation.
Forty-three years later, that part barely needs explaining.
We routinely type questions into computers and get answers back in ordinary language. We ask them to explain things, write things, make pictures, help solve problems and work through ideas.
My son has grown up in a world where that increasingly seems normal.
I didn’t.
And maybe that’s why WarGames felt so different this time.
When I first saw Joshua, it belonged to the future.
Now we live there.
The part I remembered wrong
I think I’d flattened WarGames in my memory.
Kid hacks military computer.
Computer tries to start World War III.
Kid saves world.
That’s basically the movie, but it misses the interesting part.
Joshua isn’t an evil computer.
It doesn’t wake up one morning and decide to destroy humanity.
It is playing a game.
The humans built WOPR to run war scenarios. They gave it an objective. David accidentally starts a game of Global Thermonuclear War, and Joshua keeps trying to finish it.
That’s the problem.
It doesn’t understand, at least initially, what the humans understand.
Some games shouldn’t be won.
Some shouldn’t be played at all.
The solution isn’t to destroy Joshua. It’s to teach it something.
David has it play tic-tac-toe against itself.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Eventually every path leads to the same place. Nobody wins.
Then Joshua starts running nuclear-war scenarios the same way.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Same result.
That was the part that landed differently for me in 2026.
Not because WarGames somehow predicted modern artificial intelligence. It didn’t. This is still a Hollywood movie about Cold War fears, and even at the time its depiction of military command and control wasn’t literal reality.
What it did understand was the interesting part:
What happens when a machine can pursue an objective without understanding everything humans understand about the objective?
And what happens when humans trust the machine because it can calculate things faster than they can?
Those don’t feel like science-fiction questions anymore.
They’re just questions.
The same movie
There’s another reason I keep thinking about that night.
My son was seeing WarGames for the first time.
I was seeing it again after maybe twenty years.
Same movie.
Completely different starting points.
For him, the ancient part of the movie is the technology.
The telephone handset. The floppy disks. The monochrome screens. The idea that connecting one computer to another is itself exciting.
For me, those things aren’t completely foreign. They’re artifacts from a world I remember.
The strange part for me is everything that came afterward.
The computer that talks back isn’t the futuristic part anymore.
That’s sitting in our pockets.
And that may be one of my favorite things about going back to an old movie after a long time.
The movie hasn’t changed.
You have.
The world has.
Sometimes enough time passes that you end up watching a movie about the future from inside the future it was trying to imagine.
Friday night, a little too late for me to be starting a two-hour movie, I got to do that with my son.
When it was over, he said it was cool.
And that it felt relevant to today, with AI.
I’m glad I stayed up.
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