The Merv Griffin Show

[Undertoad]

Dateline: sometime in, probably, 1975 or so.

I'm home from school because I have some light illness or something, and I'm watching The Merv Griffin Show. First they have on a celebrity of the time, someone on a current TV show. Then, for the second act, they bring out a guy who has invented an electronic game.

This game is a black box, about two feet wide and one foot high, with a console built into it with a bunch of knobs and dials and LED readouts. Looks all high-tech for its time.

I'm about 11, and I'm instantly fascinated. Because Atari has not really done its work yet, you see, and so the notion of electronic gaming is in its true infancy. Wow, I think, An electronic game being shown on TV! I've never seen that before! I better watch this because I may never see an electronic game on TV again!

The game is called "The Energy Game", or something. You turn the game on and it shows the passage of time in years. Energy resources are being used up, and you have to turn the knobs on the box to change usage. You could increase things like solar and geothermal and try to keep oil around.

At the time, there was this notion floating around that stuff was running out. Alarmists were saying there were 30 years left of oil, 50 years of natural gas, and 200 of coal at the current rate of consumption. At the same time, there was a notion that the alternative energy sources could replace the others. The Energy Game had you change the rate at which those things are used, so that you keep them around for the longest possible time. I don't remember any theoretical goal of, say, saving humanity or the world. (In the 70s, gameplay fun hadn't advanced to the point where an actual goal was required. Turning the knobs and watching the display was all we had, but we liked it.)

On The Merv Griffin Show, they had the celebrity try The Energy Game. I think he ran out of oil quickly (the frightening future world of 2003!) while the game designer stood behind him, trying to explain how he had to increase the 'renewable' knobs, and providing an alarming view of what would happen to the world if the celebrity were in fact in charge of knob-twiddling.

28 years later, it's obvious that we were never in danger of running out of these things; economics, innovation, and productivity have twiddled the knobs where no single person ever could. The celebrity turned out to be unmemorable; ditto the game designer. But Merv himself? Not only was he the host, but also a producer; and then he owned production companies; and then he branched out into casinos and then hotels. He is rich beyond our notions of what rich is. So,

Lessons Learned By Watching The Merv Griffin Show and then living 28 years:

1. Do not listen to celebrities.
2. Do not listen to game designers.
3. Do not listen to alarmists.
4. Listen to Merv Griffin.