For children, play comes so naturally. They don’t have to be encouraged to play. They don’t need equipment, or the latest graphics processors, or the perfect conditions—they just do it. What’s more, study after study has found that play has a crucial role in childhood growth and development. If you want to witness the absolute rapture of creative expression, just observe the unstructured play of children.

So what happens to us as we grow older? Children begin to compete with each other by age four or five. Play begins to transform from something we do purely for fun into something we use to achieve status and rank ourselves against other people. We play to score points. We play to win. 

And with that, play starts to become something different. Not that it can’t still be fun and joyful! Even watching other people play will bring us joy. We enjoy watching other people play so much and get so much joy by proxy from watching their achievements that we spend massive amounts of money to do so. According to StubHub, the average price of a ticket to the Super Bowl this year was $8,600. The average price for a Super Bowl ad was a cool $7 million this year, according to Ad Age. 

This kind of interest doesn’t just apply to physical games. Video-game streaming has long been a mainstay on YouTube, and entire industries have risen up around it. Top streamers on Twitch—Amazon’s livestreaming service, which is heavily gaming focused—earn upwards of $100,000 per month. And the global market for video games themselves is projected to bring in some $282 billion in revenue this year. 

Simply put, play is serious business. 

There are fortunes to be had in making our play more appealing, more accessible, more fun. All of the features in this issue dig in on the enormous amount of research and development that goes into making play “better.”  

On our cover this month is executive editor Niall Firth’s feature on the ways AI is going to upend game development. As you will read, we are about to enter the Wild West—Red Dead or not—of game character development. How will games change when they become less predictable and more fully interactive, thanks to AI-driven nonplayer characters who can not only go off script but even continue to play with each other when we’re not there? Will these even be games anymore, or will we simply be playing around in experiences? What kinds of parasocial relationships will we develop in these new worlds? It’s a fascinating read. 

There is no sport more intimately connected to the ocean, and to water, than surfing. It’s pure play on top of the waves. And when you hear surfers talk about entering the flow state, this is very much the same kind of state children experience at play—intensely focused, losing all sense of time and the world around them. Finding that flow no longer means living by the water’s edge, Eileen Guo reports. At surf pools all over the world, we’re piping water into (or out of) deserts to create perfect waves hundreds of miles from the ocean. How will that change the sport, and at what environmental cost? 

Just as we can make games more interesting, or bring the ocean to the desert, we have long pushed the limits of how we can make our bodies better, faster, stronger. Among the most recent ways we have done this is with the advent of so-called supershoes—running shoes with rigid carbon-fiber plates and bouncy proprietary foams. The late Kelvin Kiptum utterly destroyed the men’s world record for the marathon last year wearing a pair of supershoes made by Nike, clocking in at a blisteringly hot 2:00:35. Jonathan W. Rosen explores the science and technology behind these shoes and how they are changing the sport, especially in Kenya. 

There’s plenty more, too. So I hope you enjoy the Play issue. We certainly put a lot of work into it. But of course, what fun is play if you don’t put in the work?

Thanks for reading,

Mat Honan

One of the formative memories of my youth took place on a camping trip at an Alabama state park. My dad’s friend brought an at-the-time gee-whiz gadget, a portable television, and we used it to watch the very first space shuttle launch from under the loblolly pines. It was thrilling. And it was hard not to believe, watching that shuttle go up (and, a few days later, land), that we were entering an era when travel into the near reaches of space would become common. 

But as it turns out, that’s not the future we built.

This is our Build issue, and although it’s certainly about creating the future we want, in many ways this issue is also about a future that never arrived. Interplanetary space stations. Friendly robots. Even (if you squint and accept a generous definition) terraforming an increasingly uninhabitable Earth. 

Building is a popular tech industry motif—especially in Silicon Valley, where “Time to build” has become something of a call to arms following an influential essay by Marc Andreessen that lamented America’s seeming inability to build just about anything. That essay was published four years ago, at the apex of the country’s disastrous response to covid-19, when masks, PPE, and even hospital beds were in short supply. (As were basic necessities of day-to-day life like eggs, flour, and toilet paper.) It’s an alluring argument. 

Yet the future is built brick by brick from the imperfect decisions we make in the present. We don’t often recognize that the seeming steps forward we are taking today could be seen as steps back in the years to come. This could very well be how we come to view some of the efforts we are making in terms of climate remediation. Xander Peters (accompanied by some incredible photography from Virginia Hanusik) writes about Louisiana’s attempts to protect communities against increased flooding—and wonders if perhaps a managed retreat might not be the better course of action.  

Sometimes the things we don’t do, or the steps we skip, have bigger implications than the actions we do take. For the space program, the decision to race to the moon rather than to first build a way station—as was originally envisioned by some of the pioneers of space travel—may have had the long-term effect of keeping us more earthbound than we might otherwise be. David W. Brown looks at the fallout of those skipped steps and recounts the race to build a new, privately operated space station before the International Space Station comes plummeting back to Earth around 2030. 

Other times, we’re just held back because we haven’t figured out how to do things yet. Simply put: the tech just isn’t quite there. For our cover story on home robots, Melissa Heikkilä looks at how the intersection of robotics and artificial intelligence, and especially large language models, could at last be ushering in the era of helper robots that we’ve been dreaming of since the days of The Jetsons. It’s such a fertile area of development, with action from both big industry incumbents like Google and highly specialized, sometimes secretive startups, that there is far more than we could get into in a single story.

“There was an entire interview with Meta that I didn’t end up using,” Melissa told me. “They have a team working on ‘embodied AI,’ which believes that true general intelligence needs a physical element to it, such as robots or glasses. They’ve built an entire mock apartment in one of their offices, including a full-size living room, kitchen, dining room, and so on, in which they conduct experiments with robots and virtual reality. It’s pretty cool!”

Look for us to keep that reporting going at technologyreview.com. 

And there’s much more, too—including a zinger of a story from Annalee Newitz that takes on the history of brainwashing, a feature on building accountability into police body cameras, and a wild report on designing vegan cheese with generative AI. We hope you find something to take away and build on. 

Thanks for reading,

Mat Honan