Kelly Clancy (Allen Lane (UK); Riverhead (US))
Gaming is a prehistoric innovation that first came into vogue when domesticated animals and agriculture were still considered emerging technologies. Many of the most compelling and enduring games invite people to engage with simplified models of reality where they can practise reasoning and decision-making skills. Games have even inspired military strategists and economists to harness games-style thinking and simulations when trying to understand how the world works or predict the future.
Kelly Clancy鈥檚 book Playing with Reality: How games shape our world presents a sweeping narrative about how the ancient and enduring appeal of gaming has influenced philosophers, mathematicians and scientists. But it isn鈥檛 a detailed history of board games or modern video games. Instead, Clancy weaves a cautionary tale about what happens when human fascination with games translates into a belief in the power of simplified world models that are often untethered from reality. Some game-inspired ideas about human behaviour have even encouraged the world鈥檚 most powerful companies and governments to implement gamified systems that are warping the reality we live in, and not necessarily for the better.
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Clancy鈥檚 greatest concern involves game theory: the influential maths framework that distils human complexities down into simplistic depictions of people as rational agents, often narrowly defined as selfish ones, who maximise their most preferred outcomes at the expense of other players.
Developed by mathematician and physicist John von Neumann along with economist Oskar Morgenstern, game theory has spun off many scenarios for studying self-interested human behaviour. These range from the prisoner鈥檚 dilemma, in which game theory typically assumes that self-interested criminals will choose to betray one another during interrogation, to mutually assured destruction (MAD) in nuclear war planning. But Clancy cautions that game theory鈥檚 鈥渕athematical abstractions of complex scenarios鈥� frequently fail to align with empirical evidence for how humans think and behave in real life, such as tendencies towards altruism and cooperation.
Game theory鈥檚 detachment from reality can be problematic because the 鈥渙nce niche mathematical discipline has imperialized many social sciences, including economics, political science, law, ethics and psychology,鈥� argues Clancy.
One of the most consequential game theory exercises involves expecting nuclear-armed countries to refrain from launching a first strike on their peers, lest they risk mutually assured destruction through an opponent鈥檚 swift counterstrike. The MAD framework鈥檚 supposed balance requires unwavering commitment to instant nuclear retaliation, which can perversely encourage aggressive nuclear brinkmanship in the name of demonstrating resolve and prime leaders to have hair-trigger reactions to potential false alarms.
Clancy鈥檚 broader worry is that viewing the world through the game theory prism can colour how people interact with each other. If societies implement economic markets, systems of governance and work cultures that encourage greedy, self-interested behaviour, more people may be tempted to override their altruistic, cooperative impulses. 鈥淥riginally invented to chart human behavior, game theory has since warped the territory it was intended to map,鈥� writes Clancy.
Playing With Reality also explores how computer scientists鈥� obsession with games such as chess and Go has inspired some breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. Clancy鈥檚 observations probably benefited from working at Google DeepMind, as she traces the rise of dominant game-playing machine systems such as IBM鈥檚 Deep Blue and DeepMind鈥檚 line of AI models, starting with AlphaGo. But she questions whether game-playing AIs can translate to more complex real-world problems beyond specialised applications such as predicting protein interactions with drugs.
It occasionally feels like Clancy鈥檚 wide-ranging narrative may exaggerate the impact of games in certain cases. I suspect most historians wouldn鈥檛 attribute myopic German military decision-making in the two world wars primarily to the extensive use of war games. But overall, this is a rewarding read that raises important questions about who defines the rules of the game-inspired systems that dominate modern life 鈥� and whether we should automatically accept those rules.
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