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Playing with Reality
- How Games Have Shaped Our World
- Narrated by: Patty Nieman
- Length: 11 hrs and 39 mins
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Publisher's summary
“Absorbing. . . . A revealing look at the hidden role that games have played in human development for centuries.”—Kirkus
“By turns philosophical and polemical, this is a provocative and fascinating book.”—The Economist
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.
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 games can be dangerous, especially when we mistake the model worlds of games for reality itself and let gamification co-opt human decision making.
Playing with Reality explores the riveting history of games since the Enlightenment, weaving an unexpected path through military theory, political science, evolutionary biology, the development of computers and AI, cutting-edge neuroscience, and cognitive psychology. Neuroscientist and physicist Kelly Clancy 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. We used games to teach computers how to learn for themselves, and now we are designing games that will determine the shape of society and future of democracy.
In this revelatory work, Clancy makes the bold argument that the human fascination with games is the key to understanding our nature and our actions.
Critic reviews
“Playing With Reality is a foreboding prehistory of AI. Clancy conveys how we became so in thrall to gaming that we forgot where the field of play stops and the real world begins—who gets to be a player and who is merely being played."—The Washington Post
“A sweeping investigation. . . . The history fascinates, and Clancy’s sophisticated analysis highlights the dangers of overgeneralizing from games to reality. . . . Readers won’t want to put this down.”—Publishers Weekly
“Clancy weaves a clear-eyed account of games from ancient history—they predate written language, she tells us—to the modern world of computers and the Internet. . . . Clancy carefully puts these historical moments and developments in context. This approach is particularly pleasurable when it takes the form of deep dives into specific games."—Carmen Maria Machado, Scientific American
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Story
One week in late 1999, more than 50,000 people converged on Seattle. Their goal: to shut down the World Trade Organization conference and send a message that working-class people would not quietly accept the runaway economic globalization that threatened their livelihoods. Though their mission succeeded, it was not without blowback. In the oral history One Week to Change the World, award-winning journalist DW Gibson pieces together a complex and compelling account of what really went down in Seattle.
By: DW Gibson
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Dream Cities
- Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World
- By: Wade Graham
- Narrated by: Paul Bellantoni
- Length: 9 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Dream Cities explores our cities in a new way—as expressions of ideas, often conflicting, about how we should live, work, play, make, buy, and believe. It tells the stories of the real architects and thinkers whose imagined cities became the blueprints for the world we live in.
By: Wade Graham
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Merlin’s Tour of the Universe, Revised and Updated for the Twenty-First Century
- A Traveler’s Guide to Blue Moons and Black Holes, Mars, Stars, and Everything Far
- By: Neil deGrasse Tyson
- Length: 3 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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In Neil deGrasse Tyson’s delightful journey through the cosmos, his fictional character Merlin responds to popular questions asked by adults and children alike. Merlin, a timeless visitor from Planet Omniscia in the Andromeda Galaxy, has observed first-hand many of the major scientific events of Earth’s history. Merlin’s friends include the most important scientific figures and explorers of all time—da Vinci, Magellan, Newton, Einstein, and Hubble.