Alternative Character Interpretation: Joshua's reaction to David's use of the backdoor password is to assume that David is Professor Falken, but Falken's assumed dead and hasn't been in contact with Joshua for the better part of a decade — an eternity in computer time. This partly explains why Joshua's so eager to continue the simulation no matter what, since Joshua is implied to have had little interaction with anyone in the intervening years, and is now trying to impress his 'father'.
Aluminum Christmas Trees: Turning an empty Pringles can into a high-gain wifi antenna is a real thing that some college students do to be able to leach free wifi off the McDonald's or Starbucks down the street from their dorm. It's called a "cantenna", and it actually works really well assuming you're aiming to steal 5GHz high speed WiFi.
Captain Obvious Aesop: 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 common rhetoric for both U.S. and Soviet forces for decades. Still, it was an important message, as in the same year of 1983, President Ronald Reagan was pursuing the Strategic Defense Initiative (nicknamed "Star Wars"), whose goal was finding a way for a winnable nuclear war. On the other side, Anatoly Dobrynin, then Soviet ambassador to the US, had written that 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.
Contested Sequel: WarGames: The Dead Code, released in 2008, in which WOPR/Joshua, an elder Dr. Falken, and various friendly hackers have to fight a modern game server with military applications (apparently in that order, seeing how many people game on her) named RIPLEY. This one has considerably more real-life damage — there is no real thermonuclear war, but there are some devastating non-nuclear attacks on American infrastructure.
Diagnosed by the Audience: 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.
Genius Bonus: The guard's discussion in the beginning involves someone he knew who grew plants while chanting "om mani padme hum", which is a Sanskrit mantra also known as "the jewel of the lotus flower".
On September 26, 1983, just three months following its release, a Soviet early warning station detected 5 inbound ICBMs. Colonel Stanislav Petrov, the man in charge of the station, decided it was a false alarm and did not report it to his superiors. He surmised that no one would launch just five ICBMs as a first strike... they'd launch EVERYTHING. The "Petrov Save Incident" (as it is known as) is considered to be a World War III close call.
On the American side, in 1979 war was 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.
Late in the Cold War, Russia installed an automated response system that would order a retaliatory strike without human intervention, called the "Dead Hand" or "Perimeter System", which has been criticized as vulnerable to hacking, a very disturbing case of Life Imitates Art. The system is alleged to still be operational...
Maybe. Very little is actually known about "Dead Hand", but there is credible evidence that the final decision is still made by humans.
Falken predicts that bees were likeliest to replace humanity in the event of a nuclear war. 25 years later, bees started dying in droves...
Maury Chaykin as Jim Sting says: "Remember you told me to tell you when you were acting rudely and insensitively?" He would later go on to play Nero Wolfe, a character who could use those sort of warning.
If the video game sequel is to be believed, David might consider "Joshua" a personal meme for him in-universe; he's the CEO of "Joshua" Information Systems.
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.
Michael Madsen is the missile control technician at the beginning who says, "Turn your key, sir!", and he's saying it to John Spencer, years before they became famous as Mr. Blonde in Reservoir Dogs and Leo McGarry in The West Wing, respectively. As a bonus, this scene was among the earliest movie roles for both actors.
Sequelitis: Most people have no idea that a sequel was made. This is a very good thing. Filmed a full two decades after the original, The Dead Code features only one returning character, played by a different actor (two if you consider WOPR/Joshua), and has little to do with the original film outside of a handful of connections. It also features some of the worst writing and acting ever committed to celluloid.
The strategy game DEFCON was strongly inspired by the computer representation of nuclear war in WarGames, and Introversion's earlier Uplink was strongly inspired by everything else in the movie. Uplink includes a 'Protovision' server which can be hacked with 'JOSHUA', resulting in the games list up top; you can play a prototype version of Global Thermonuclear War, which spawns a newswire story about a nuclear launch scare.
Unintentional Period Piece: The then-contemporary theme of Cold War nuclear panic definitely dates this film to before the Soviet collapse, as does its treatment of then-emerging computer technology (to early in The '80s). 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 The '80s, 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 by typing it into Google.
How many modern viewers facepalm when they see the list of passwords on a sheet of paper right next to the computer? In fact, if you're reading this website, that's likely exactly what you've been told not to do ever since you were big enough to hit a spacebar. (Anyone in tech support, or who enjoy Not Always Right and similar "customer service hell" anecdotes, knows that this still happens today.)
Ironically, depending on the level of control you have over your workspace, this is becoming less of an issue; very frequently today, if someone has physical access to the system, you're doomed anyway as far as security goes. Though on the other hand, it does make it easier to cause mischief quickly.
For that matter, using your kid's name as a password is just as bad. Anyone who got caught doing something so obvious at the real NORAD would most likely be fired outright, if not prosecuted for endangering national security. Falken only gets away with it in the movie because it is an unauthorized backdoor that NORAD doesn't know about.
While 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 relevant aesop is pretty much into Captain Obvious Aesop territory), the dangers presented by computer security threats are even more pertinent to the present than they were in The '80s now that Everything Is Online, and talk of cyber-warfare abounds. It is obvious from the Values Dissonance 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.
Falken's speech comparing the possibility of sudden human extinction to that of the dinosaurs is also relevant when time is running out to mitigate climate change before it makes the earth uninhabitable.
While David's school writing down the password to their system where he can get to it easily is bad, the fact that they seem to change it regularly is a good security practice.
Tropes found in War Games: The Dead Code include:
Anvilicious: Dr. Falken gives a little speech about how he designed the WOPR to work in tandem with RIPLEY rather than against her. The last word of his speech is "Bipartisanship". This in a movie that came out the same year Barack Obama was elected President.
Tropes found in the video game adaptations include:
The Problem with Licensed Games: The PC version is a low-budget Command & Conquer ripoff, which isn't so bad except for the fact that the game was distributed from the publisher with a computer virus that locked up systems at the time!
", and it actually works really well assuming you're aiming to steal 5GHz high speed WiFi.