Playing with Reality

April 15, 2024
Neuroscientist Clancy debuts with a sweeping investigation of the roles games have played in human history. Examining why humans are drawn to games, Clancy contends that the process of mastering them by learning rules and the possible outcomes of various moves satisfies humanity’s evolutionary drive to understand cause-and-effect relationships. Tracing the influence of games from the earliest known dice (found in a 7,000-year-old Iranian settlement) through SimCity, Clancy notes that probability theory grew out of Italian scholar Gerolamo Cardano’s and French mathematician Blaise Pascal’s Renaissance-era writings about dice. Elsewhere, she suggests that Kaiser Wilhelm owed his battlefield success to playing Kriegsspiel (a chesslike war game with scoring based on the historical efficacy of various military tactics) as a child, and describes how chess has been used by AI researchers to measure the intelligence of software. The history fascinates, and Clancy’s sophisticated analysis highlights the dangers of overgeneralizing from games to reality. For instance, she argues that game theory, which stemmed from Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann’s early 20th-century musings about strategy in two-player zero-sum games, has been misapplied to real-life situations by economists who fail to recognize that the premises of von Neumann’s hypothetical game (players have fixed goals and “all value can be objectively measured”) don’t transfer neatly to the real world. Readers won’t want to put this down. Agent: Will Francis, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.

April 15, 2024
An intriguing book that shows how games are much more than just diverting fun. Clancy is a neuroscientist and physicist whose research focuses on the mechanics of human intelligence, and she has worked with the AI lab DeepMind. Consequently, she brings an interesting perspective to this study on games, game theory, and the meaning of games. People have played games for millennia ("Games are older than written language. Games like Go, chess, backgammon, and mancala are living artifacts"), but Clancy is most interested in games designed to simulate reality, even if in symbolic form. Chess was the classic example, used to teach and refine war strategy. The idea of simulations evolved toward attempts to forecast battle outcomes, using scale models of actual terrain and opposing teams of officers. Sometimes, this was spectacularly successful, but on other occasions, it failed due to unpredictable events. In any case, the idea of using games to simulate reality and predict outcomes became embedded in the culture, and the subsequent development of game theory gave it the patina of scientific certainty. It spread into virtually every aspect of modern life, including economics and politics. However, Clancy notes that these systems are bound by the creators' rules, which assume rational self-interest from the players. The key issue is that human decision-making is not often rational, although it might be better to say that it entails a higher level of rationality than a game can incorporate. "Game theory is not a very good model of people," writes Clancy, "but it's good enough to be trouble." While this is absorbing material, the nature of the subject means that parts of the book require close attention. For diligent readers, it's well worth the effort. A revealing look at the hidden role that games have played in human development for centuries.

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