Playing With Reality is a revealing look at the hidden role that games have played in human development for centuries. Kelly Clancy provides a wide-ranging intellectual history that reveals how important games have been to human progress, and what’s at stake when we forget what games we’re really playing.
Clancy claims we play games to learn about the world, to understand our minds and the minds of others, and to make predictions about the future. Games are an essential aspect of humanity and a powerful tool for modeling reality. They’re also a lot of fun.
But, at the same time, games can be dangerous, especially when we mistake the model worlds of games for reality itself. The recent news stories about people falling in love with their Artificial Intelligence chat-bots is a prime example.
Playing With Reality explores the history of games since the Enlightenment. I enjoyed Clancy’s ability to weave a path through military theory, political science, evolutionary biology, the development of computers and AI, cutting-edge neuroscience, and cognitive psychology. She covers a lot of ground! But the details are enthralling!
It helps that Kelly Clancy is a neuroscientist and physicist. Her convincing analysis shows how intertwined games have been with the arc of history. War games shaped the outcomes of real wars in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe. Game theory warped our understanding of human behavior and brought us to the brink of annihilation—yet still underlies basic assumptions in economics, politics, and technology design. Games are more than just a tool…they can turn into weapons, too.
I used games to teach my students about using computers when I was a College Professor. Now, with powerful AI programs, games are being designed that could determine the shape of our society and future of democracy. In this astonishing book, Kelly Clancy makes a strong argument that the human fascination with games is the key to understanding our nature and our actions. What games do you play? GRADE: A
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
- Part I: How to Know the Unknown
- Chapter 1: The Play of Creation — 3
- Chapter 2: How Heaven Works — 16
- Chapter 3: Dice Playing God — 41
- Part II: Naming the Game
- Chapter 4: Kriegsspiel, the Science of War — 71
- Chapter 5: Rational Fools — 85
- Chapter 6: The Clothes Have No Emperor — 112
- Chapter 7: A Map That Warps the Territory — 137
- Part III: Building Better Players
- Chapter 8: Chess, the Drosophila of Intelligence — 107
- Chapter 9: The End of Evolution — 177
- Chapter 10: Nous ex Machina — 200
- Chapter 11: Cogito Ergo Zero Sum — 222
- Part IV: Building Better Games
- Chapter 12: SimCity — 249
- Chapter 13: Moral Geometry: Playing Utopia — 257
- Chapter 14: Mechanism Design: Building Games Where Everyone Wins — 278
- Epilogue — 301
- Acknowledgments — 307
- Notes — 309
- Bibliography — 325
- Index — 349
I lost all interest in games by the age of seven and have never remotely understood their appeal as an adult. I can sort of understand why people would play old school card games like bridge or poker as a form of socializing but it doesn’t appeal to me at all. Ditto chess or backgammon, I kind of get the idea but no there’s appeal.
I do not get adults playing those gimmicky card games or boardgames, and find the whole role playing thing infantilizing. I’d much rather watch a movie, read a book, listen to music, go for a walk, watch paint dry…
Byron, I used to play video games but slowly quit after I decided reading books, watching movies, listening to music, were more satisfying. But most of our friends play games–mostly card games weekly–and of course, there are folks like Cap’n Bob that love to play at the casino.
Pretty much what Bryon said. Although at my senior center, that is the most popular pastime.
Well, they are something that one can do that doesn’t much impinge on conversation…aside from eat together (drinking together definitely can slow down the exchange of coherent ideas).
My mother loved games and was EXTREMELY competitive, so we played a lot of games, and always played to win, whether card games (I remember as a teenager playing Hearts with my grandmother and Aunt Gussie) or Monopoly or Scrabble (a favorite of Jackie’s). We played London Cabbie, Trivial Pursuit, Upwords, backgammon and Mexican Train (a dominoes game) over the years. Now that none of them are around, we play solo brain-stimulating games online – Wordle, Quordle (and Quordle Sequence), Octordle (and two others), Worldle (a geography game), Freecell, Hearts (yes, my old favorite), as well as solitaire card games.
Jeff, my parents met with a card group monthly to play card games. My father played golf occasionally (my brother followed in his footsteps and golfs weekly). Patrick and Katie play board games with their friends when they get together. But, I’m more like Byron: I’d rather read a book.
I also do other NYT word games – crosswords (another of my mother’s favorites), Connections., etc.
Jeff, many of my friends NY Times games especially the crosswords.
When our kids were young, we had games night every week. We started off with typical kids’ games like Hungry Hungry Hippos, Snakes & Ladders, and Operation, gradually moving up to Monopoly, Life, Aggravation, and Masterpiece (where my girls say they learned a great deal about art). We also always played Scrabble and poker (for points, no betting) along with other card games. I remember when Julia was getting her pre-evaluation for kindergarten: the teacher asked her to sort some cards by number or color. “Oh, I can do this,” she replied. “It’s like playing poker.” The teacher was never quite sure of my parental role after that, lol. These days, word games are my favorite: in addition to Wordle and the other word games Jeff mentioned, I also play SpellBee and Wordshake (a Boggle-type game where you have to connect the letters to make words). Other than video poker at the casinos, Ms. Pac-Man and various forms of pinball, I’ve never played arcade or computer/video games. I’m completely uninterested in Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty or D&D, etc., but I can see the appeal. As Peter Gabriel once sang, “Games without frontiers/War without tears.”
Deb, we played kid games with our kids, too. Patrick was great at MONOPOLY! We have friends who play poker at the casino. WORDLE is popular with many friends.
Deb, I’m picturing 5 year old Julia with an eyeshade doing a fancy shuffle and dealing out a hand of poker.
We were at John’s office Christmas party (a family event) when the girls were young and some of the guys wanted to play poker. Victoria (who was no more than ten at the time) said she wanted to play. You could see the guys deciding to indulge her with a kind of “ok, little girl, you can play.” Then Victoria sat down and said, “Texas Hold ‘Em and eights are wild.” You could see the guys realizing she knew what she was doing. After a few minutes later there was a collective groan from the table: Victoria had taken the pot!
Deb, I see from that example that Victoria has some of your stellar qualities!
At one point we played bridge with my parents, but my mother was an unbearable player. She cried and whined about how horrible her cards were, then she’d get gin (or whatever). My father was not known for his patience, and he’d usually end up throwing down his cards and storming out.
Fun.
I also played canasta for a while as a teenager. But I have always loved solitaire games.
Jeff, when I was teaching BUSINESS APPLICATIONS–a computer class–I had to constantly monitor students who would skip the work and play SOLITAIRE.
It’s a mixed bag, for me…I haven’t played too many board nor card games in recent decades, and I’m notably bad at chess, but did enjoy them early on (and on very rare occasions, still do). Logical puzzles and crosswords and such will infrequently engage me, as well…and will still watch a JEOPARDY episode on occasion as long as it’s not one of the dumbed-down one (I was very amused some years back by a CELEBRITY J episode featuring actor and comedian Andy Richter, a woman country music singer/musician whose name I should look up, and CNN’s newsie Wolf Blitzer…Richter won rather easily, though the singer did respectably, and Blitzer might’ve gotten one answer right during the entire game, ended up deep in negative numbers, and, as Richter noted later, close paraphrase: “And you have to keep in mind, these were CELEBRITY JEOPARDY answers/questions we were being called on to figure out…not much in the way of calculus nor abstruse philosophy.”
Hmm…I need to check my dropped letters! And, somehow, I’ve been thinking all these years that the opponent of Richter and Blitzer was a country singer, when it was H’wood media crush Dana Delaney, who did reasonably well. Very surprised I’d forget her participation.
2009, I gather: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD5lbUwpbC8
And when not dropping “S”es, I add an “E” to Dana Delany’s name…
Todd, you should just blame WORDPRESS like I do!
Todd, I watch (and play by supplying answers to the questions I know) JEOPARDY. But once the questions veer into the British Monarchy, I’m done.
We don’t watch Jeopardy, we watch British game shows like Pointless. We always sit back and pass when questions about Home Secretaries of the 20th Century show up.
George, as I’m unlikely to read this book, can you tell me the connection between chess, fruit flies, and intelligence?
Jeff, chess, fruit flies, and intelligence all have moves.
And are hard to extirpate, though we know the Drumpf Admin is doing its level best to rid us of at least one, not being particularly blessed with any themselves. Well, they might have fruit flies, given Drumpf himself and his habits.
I beat Linda in Scrabble last night, as usual! I wonder what this dame would have to say about that! Also, I won $120 playing the slots on Saturday! I’ll bet she could write a whole chapter about that! Yes, this book sounds like a lot of hooey to me!
Bob, you are quite a gamer! Congratulations on the slot win! Did the OWLHOOT Box arrive?
Yes, amid cries of regret from the spouse! Thanks, and I apologize for not acknowledging it sooner! Been a busy time lately!
Bob, glad the OWLHOOT Box meets with your approval. I feel your pain. I have to smuggle books into my house, too!