{"id":10958,"date":"2025-09-25T11:41:42","date_gmt":"2025-09-25T15:41:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=10958"},"modified":"2025-09-25T11:41:42","modified_gmt":"2025-09-25T15:41:42","slug":"two-books-about-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2025\/09\/25\/two-books-about-games\/","title":{"rendered":"Two books about games."},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>In <em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/2960\/9780593538180\">Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World<\/a><\/em>, neuroscientist Kelly Clancy examines how the frameworks of games have affected myriad aspects of human society, and how more recently game theory and related ideas have led to damaging and even ruinous policies that continue today with the mindless (pun intended) push to make everything AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Playing games leads our brains to produce dopamine, and games with uncertainty function as variable reward systems, increasing those dopamine surges and further encouraging us to keep playing. Thus we see evidence of games going back to ancient Babylon (the Royal Game of Ur), Egypt (Senet), and Africa (mancala), with games often used as tests of intelligence or readiness for a position as a leader or even as royalty. Such games often included substantial elements of chance, including the progenitors of dice, which led to early calculations of probabilities well before the Europeans started to figure this stuff out in the wake of the Renaissance. Games have evolved over time in complexity, and as they have developed, they have further permeated our non-playing world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<script src=https:\/\/bookshop.org\/widgets.js data-type=\"book\" data-affiliate-id=\"2960\" data-sku=\"9780593538180\"><\/script>\n\n\n\n<p>Clancy sets the stage by giving that history and an explanation of what happens in the brain when we play games, including games of chance and games of strategy, and then moves into the more sordid history of games affecting \u2026 well, history. She goes into the story of Kriegsspiel, an early wargame that was first developed by a Prussian nobleman two hundred years ago, and after several decades found its way into military leaders\u2019 hands, where it became a tactical training tool for officers in the Prussian and later German armies. Clancy connects it to the Germans\u2019 early successes in World War I and the use of the <em>Blitzkrieg<\/em> strategy in World War II, both as a way to explain how we can use games to learn and to think more flexibly, as well as how games can lead to unexpected and even tragic outcomes when used without guardrails.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Game theory ends up the main character of the second half of <em>Playing with Reality<\/em>, as Clancy points out that the way game theoreticians took over much of economic teaching, dovetailing as it did with the myth of the \u2018rational\u2019 man, led to decades of policy failures across the world that were based on a set of faulty assumptions about how people would act. (She did not, unfortunately, mention the \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/knowyourmeme.com\/memes\/its-time-for-some-game-theory\">it\u2019s time for some game theory<\/a>\u201d meme.) This idea of \u201ceconomic man\u201d or \u201crational man\u201d had a stranglehold on economic instruction throughout the world for decades, well past the point where folks like Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky had published research showing that people are in fact <em>not<\/em> rational, and often fall prey to cognitive biases, leading to results you won\u2019t predict if you\u2019re stuck in the standard model.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Clancy saves some of her particular ire for the AI gold rush and the grifters pushing it, cautioning that these LLMs are not actually exhibiting \u2018intelligence,\u2019 and that there\u2019s danger in treating \u201clanguage like a game without meaning.\u201d Much of what she says about these energy-devouring scams could have been written this week, even though the book itself was first published last year; she decries the lack of regulation or even common sense in many of the uses of so-called AI, and the history of the overapplication of games and game theory to real-life \u2013 often treating the world as a zero-sum game, when it is manifestly not \u2013 shows how easily we can destroy the world by thinking in those terms. (She cites a specific example from the Cold War, where one Soviet engineer decided to ignore an alarm that a U.S. ICBM was heading towards Russia; the alarm was false, of course, but that one person\u2019s decision, against the \u2018rules\u2019 of the game, saved us from World War III.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Clancy\u2019s focus is on how games are intrinsic to humanity, how we\u2019ve tried to model reality in our games and then taken the games and tried to apply them back to reality, with mixed results if we\u2019re being kind. Mathematician Marcus du Sautoy takes a different approach in his book <em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/2960\/9781541606333\">Around the World in 80 Games: A Mathematician Unlocks the Secrets of the Greatest Games<\/a><\/em>, which may not actually get to eighty games (and certainly not the greatest ones) but does at least provide some interesting histories of games outside of the western canon, truly going around the world to explain the origins and uses of games in Africa, South America, and across Asia. The book offers some superficial looks at the math behind some of these games, but it\u2019s scant, and it\u2019s hard to get away from du Sautoy\u2019s pie-eyed optimism around AI, which he seems to view as an unmitigated positive that will take drudgery from our lives and allow us to play more games.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Du Sautoy succeeds most when he gets a little deeper into the specifics of a game, such as the analysis of which properties are the best ones to buy in Monopoly (the orange ones above all), or the history of tarot cards (which had nothing to do with the woo for which various charlatans have adapted the game), or the stories of games from non-European cultures that were unfamiliar to me, like Sudan\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Dala_(game)\">Dala<\/a> \u2013 many of which have been \u2018solved\u2019 by mathematicians, for better or for worse. Du Sautoy writes very much like a mathematician, so when he\u2019s in the weeds, he\u2019s actually clearer and his passion is palpable, but when he starts veering off into philosophy or his almost religious belief that AI is going to save the world, not only is the prose harder to read, but he\u2019s clearly out of his depth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<script src=https:\/\/bookshop.org\/widgets.js data-type=\"book\" data-affiliate-id=\"2960\" data-sku=\"9781541606333\"><\/script>\n\n\n\n<p>Both books quote many of the same sources on the philosophy of games, including Bernard Suits\u2019s <em>The Grasshopper<\/em> and C. Nhi Nguyen\u2019s <em>Games: Agency as Art<\/em>, which makes their tonal differences more stark. Clancy is the realist here, someone who certainly seems to like games but understands their limitations as models for society as a whole, while du Sautoy is the Panglossian dilettante whose life of relative privilege \u2013 his grandfather ran the publisher Faber &amp; Faber and his godmother was T.S. Eliot\u2019s wife Valerie \u2013 has perhaps blinded him to the realities of daily life for most people. Du Sautoy does cover more specific games, if that\u2019s where your interest lies, while Clancy has much more to say about games as a whole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Next up: Staying on a theme, I\u2019m reading Philip K. Dick\u2019s pulpy <em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/2960\/9780547572437\">The Game-Players of Titan<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World, neuroscientist Kelly Clancy examines how the frameworks of games have affected myriad aspects of human society, and how more recently game theory and related ideas have led to damaging and even ruinous policies that continue today with the mindless (pun intended) push to make everything [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1429,60,696,161,1482,225,830],"class_list":["post-10958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-boardgames","tag-games-2","tag-highly-recommended","tag-history-of-games","tag-non-fiction","tag-philosophy","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10958"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10958\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10959,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10958\/revisions\/10959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}