History YMMV / WarGames

* CaptainObviousAesop: Nuclear war is a bad thing that should be avoided. In fact, the film's climax essentially just reaffirms the logic of mutually assured destruction, hardly groundbreaking considering that by 1983, it had been the basis for both U.S. and Soviet policy for decades.
** This is not true - Carter had changed the US's policy to "countervailing strategy" in 1980, and in 1983 Reagan was pursuing the Strategic Defense Initiative (nicknamed "Star Wars"), both of which aimed at finding a way to a winnable nuclear war. On the other side, Anatoly Dobrynin, then Soviet ambassador to the US, has written that in 1983 the Soviet leaders were convinced Reagan was planning to launch a first strike and were prepared to respond. It was only after a series of (real life) US wargames called Proud Prophet in 1983, in which every strategy tried led to total destruction of the USA, USSR and Europe with half a billion deaths, that Reagan accepted a nuclear war was unwinnable, and the chiefs of staff started revising the US's war plans with an emphasis on avoiding nuclear war instead of winning it.

** WOPR is basically ChatGPT... except that the real-life military is sensible enough not to use AI as the component that could connect to the military central network.

* SeinfeldIsUnfunny: The tropes around hacking can look retroactively tired.
** There had not been another mainstream movie like this before. The concept of everything being online and how it could lead to Nuclear War was both fascinating and terrifying at the time. The premise of hackers having god-like powers has been beaten to death since then and may be why most people have no clue that a sequel was ever made.

* AmbiguousDisorder: Computer worker Malvin specifically asked his friend Jim to let him know whenever he was behaving 'rudely and insensitively' -- his behavior at the time and reaction to having it pointed out imply something along these lines.

** On the American side, in 1979 war was [[https://gizmodo.com/the-computer-simulation-that-almost-started-world-war-i-1686123550 narrowly averted]] when NORAD reported a large scale nuclear attack that turned out to be nonexistent. In a disturbing parallel to the film, the cause of the false alarm was ultimately traced to a program meant to be used only for command post exercises being loaded on the wrong computer system.

** Whilst pretty much averted with the nuclear issues (not as obviously relevant as in the Cold War, and to be fair the dangers of all-out nuclear war are so well-worn the [[AnAesop relevant aesop]] is pretty much into CaptainObviousAesop territory), the dangers presented by computer security threats are even more pertinent to the present than they were in TheEighties now that EverythingIsOnline, and talk of cyber-warfare abounds. It is obvious from the ValuesDissonance example above that many of the basic security mistakes mentioned above are sadly still with us today, too. Whether the idea of the maverick hacker ultimately showing up the military's flaws is relevant in these days of certain high-profile whistleblowers has any resonance however, is uncertain.

* RetroactiveRecognition: [[Film/ReservoirDogs Mr. Blonde]] is the technician at the beginning who says, "Turn your key, sir!", and he's saying it to [[Series/TheWestWing Leo McGarry]]. As a bonus, this scene was among the earliest movie roles for ''both'' actors.

* UnintentionalPeriodPiece: The then-contemporary theme of Cold War nuclear panic definitely dates this film to before TheGreatPoliticsMessUp, as does its treatment of then-emerging computer technology (to early in TheEighties). And of course there's the technology itself: dialing into remote systems with an acoustic coupler modem looks positively quaint in the era of broadband internet, as do supercomputers with graphics that the most basic of modern [=PCs=] would put to shame (or even a computer of 1983). (The acoustic coupler modem was already outdated in 1983. It was just there to be visually interesting.) The lax attitude to computer security is almost a textbook example of how ''not'' to do things these days, though to the irritation of IT people the world over, people still insist on writing down passwords to this day. And this being TheEighties, there's the obligatory video arcade scene. Not to mention the way Lightman did his research on Professor Falken: going to the library, looking him up in the card catalog, reading books and microfilms; something that one can do today [[TechnologyMarchesOn by typing it into Google.]]

* SomeAnvilsNeedToBeDropped:
** [[spoiler:"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?"]]
** It's a rare movie that does it without demonizing anyone on either side or reducing them to [[StrawCharacter clichéd stereotypes]].

* TheProblemWithLicensedGames: The PC version is a low-budget Videogame/CommandAndConquer ripoff, which isn't so bad except for the fact that the game is distributed from the publisher with a computer virus that locks up the system at the time!