Pong: a game so simple a bundle of lab-grown brain cells could play it. This might sound like a low blow, but it's true – last month, Australia-based startup Cortical Labs challenged its creation DishBrain, a biological computer chip that uses a combination of living neurons and silicon, to play the early console classic. The game – a 2D version of table tennis where players control a rectangle "paddle", moving it up and down to rally a ball – ran in the background, wired up to the DishBrain. Electrical stimulations were fed into the cells to represent the placement of the paddle and feedback was pinged when the ball was hit or missed. The scientists then measured the DishBrain's response, observing that it expended more or less energy depending on the position of the ball.

The first-person shooter was born in silence. Before Sega's Heavyweight Champ would spawn the fighting genre or an Arpanet contractor and outdoorsman would invent the text adventure, networked, multiplayer matches took place in the barren halls of Maze War, bounded by vectors, given form only in the imagination of those with access to a terrifically expensive PDS-1 computer. Updates eventually added spectator functionality, computer-controlled enemies, up to eight simultaneous players, and a level editor--essentially everything that would come to define the deathmatch. Few people today remember, let alone can claim to have played, Maze War. But you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who hasn't heard of Pong, which came out the year prior, and despite its considerably less impressive graphics and features was among the first games to include sound.

Al Alcorn knew he was being wooed. Nolan Bushnell, the tall, brash, young engineer from Alcorn's work-study days at Ampex, had shown up at Alcorn's Sunnyvale office. Bushnell was driving a new blue station wagon. "It's a company car," he said with feigned nonchalance. He offered to drive Alcorn, recently hired as an associate engineer at Ampex, to see the "game on a TV screen" that Bushnell and Ted Dabney had developed at their new startup company. The two men drove to an office in Mountain View, near the highway. The space was large, about 10,000 square feet, and looked like a cross between an electronics lab and an assembly warehouse. Oscilloscopes and lab benches filled one area. Half-built cabinets and screen with wires protruding from them sat in another. Bushnell walked with Alcorn to a sinuous, six-foot-tall fiberglass cabinet with a screen at eye level. Bushnell was proud of what he called its "spacey-looking" shape.

Al Alcorn knew he was being wooed. Nolan Bushnell, the tall, brash, young engineer from Alcorn's work-study days at Ampex, had shown up at Alcorn's Sunnyvale office. Bushnell was driving a new blue station wagon. "It's a company car," he said with feigned nonchalance. He offered to drive Alcorn, recently hired as an associate engineer at Ampex, to see the "game on a TV screen" that Bushnell and Ted Dabney had developed at their new startup company. The two men drove to an office in Mountain View, near the highway. The space was large, about 10,000 square feet, and looked like a cross between an electronics lab and an assembly warehouse. Oscilloscopes and lab benches filled one area. Half-built cabinets and screen with wires protruding from them sat in another. Bushnell walked with Alcorn to a sinuous, six-foot-tall fiberglass cabinet with a screen at eye level. Bushnell was proud of what he called its "spacey-looking" shape.

Or your teenage son becomes immersed, with increasing agitation, in a computer game. As his temper worsens, his performance declines until he ends up trashing the console in a fit of adolescent rage. Computer angst - now a universal feature of modern life - is an expensive business. But the days of the unfeeling, infuriating machine will soon be over. Thanks to break throughs in AI (artificial intelligence), psychology, electronics and other research fields, scientists are now creating computers and robots that can detect, and respond to, users' feelings.