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.