More than 10 years after its inception, the Alternate Reality Kit (ARK), designed by R. Smith at Xerox PARC,remainsoneofthemoreuniqueandvisionarydomain-specificVPLs. ARK,implementedinSmalltalk80, provides users with a 2D animated environment for creating interactive simulations. The system is intended to be used by non-expert programmers to create simulations and by an even wider audience to interact with the simulations. In order to help users to understand the fundamental laws of nature, ARK uses a highly literal metaphor in which the user controls an on-screen hand which can interact with physical objects, like balls and blocks, which possess masses and velocities and with objects, called interactors, representing physical laws, like gravity [Smith 1986]. By giving a kind of physical reality to abstract laws, the system attempts to remove some of the mystery surrounding the ways in which such laws interact with objects and each other. Users can modify any objects in the environment using constructs called message boxes and buttons, viewing the results of their changes in real time. The simulation runs in an “alternate reality” contained within a window inside an all-encompassing “meta-reality.” The structure is very much like a modern windows-and-desktop GUI. The programmer can move the hand between alternate realities and pull objects out of the simulation and into meta-reality at anytime. An object which has been lifted out of its alternate reality does not participate in the simulation until it is dropped out of meta-reality. The example of a user reaching into and removing an object from an alternate reality highlights one of the more interesting design issues in ARK, namely the necessity to occasionally break with the highly literal physical world metaphor in order to provide useful functionality. Smith refers to this issue as the tension between magic and literalism in ARK [Smith 1987]. While using a hand which can grab physical objects is a highly literal component of the system, allowing a user to reach into a simulation and alter or remove objects