Timothy Leary into computer games

Press, 28 August 1984, Page 36

Timothy Leary into computer games

By

CAROLYN LUMSDEN

of the Associated Press (through NZPA-AP) He has tried LSD, jail, even a stand-up comedy routine. Now Timothy Leary is designing something called interactive software. “Sounds almost obscene and illegal, doesn’t it?” he joked. Interactive software is a fancy term for computer games that occasionally stop for directions and other involvement from players. Thousands of people are paying $3O per computer program. So Leary and a few friends are getting into the act with a new variation. The 60s drug guru, who once advised youths to “turn on, tune in, drop out,” says he has persuaded such people as novelists Terry Southern and William Burroughs to write for his company, Futique, Inc, once he lands a contract with a software firm to produce the games. “Terry can’t wait to do a kind of dark, mildly erotic, satirical novel," Leary said in a telephone interview from his Beverly Hills, California, home. Burroughs stands ready to collaborate on an adaptation of one of his works, either “Naked Lunch” or “The Place of Dead Roads,” said his secretary, James Grauerholz.

Speaking before a Boston advertising club recently, Leary said his idea was to publish computer fiction games programmed to learn something about the player-reader. Interactive fiction differs from such games as “PacMan” and “Space Invaders” in that the player becomes part of the plot. The playerdetective of a game called “Deadline,” for example, can interview suspects’ about a suspicious death. “Tell me about Mr Robner,”. the player types into the terminal, and a character called Mrs Robner responds on the screen, “I loved my husband, no matter what you may think.” Another game would ask the player questions, aiming to create a personality profile, as the story progresses. “Self-knowledge is the goal,” Leary said. He is negotiating with Trapeze, Inc, a San Francisco software entertainment company, whose president, Andrea Benjamin, wouldn’t comment except to say, “We wouldn’t be talking with him unless we thought he had some very creative ideas.” Leary, educated as a mathematical psychologist, taught at leading universities from 1946 to 1959, designed psychological tests and wrote such tomes as “T(je Interpersonal Diagno-

sis of Personality” before his 60s research into mindaltering drugs made him famous. He served 44 months in prison on charges of possessing and transporting drugs. In 1970, he escaped from jail and fled to Algeria with the help of radical Weathermen, staying there with the exiled Black Panther leader, Eldridge Cleaver, until his arrest in Afghanistan two years later. In the last few years, Leary has made a living from public appearances, debating a Watergate figure, Gordon Liddy, and even trying out a comedy act at a Los Angeles nightclub. Much has changed over the years and now, Leary says, students ask him for stock tips instead of drug tips. What remains the same is that he and his friends are “still trying to change everything as rapidly as possible, and so far it’s legal,” he said.