Playing with Reality

How Games Have Shaped Our World

By: Kelly Clancy

Narrated by: Patty Nieman

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE ECONOMIST AND THE GUARDIAN

“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.

©2024 Kelly Clancy (P)2024 Penguin Audio

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

"Comprehensive. . . . Clancy warns of the societal risks of allowing mathematical models to govern political decisions."—The New Yorker

“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

Fluidity of concept to reality explanation from the author

While sometimes the book reads like a phd essay, I thoroughly enjoyed diving into a world I thought I knew alot about, just to find out I knew nothing! From the origins of kriegsspiel and how some forms of thinkings have manipulated people into certain thought processes to this day, the book was intensely informative and engaging. Human nature being so liquid while the elites try to create binary world simulating engines to determine our desires and control us psychologically is exactly what is so wrong and perverse with extreme capitalism.

Rambling….

The author’s discussion of her subject matter seems too shallow for her cautionary notes to be given credit. Way too much of the book is devoted to critical assessment of its subject matter, while discussion of the subject matters are so shallow that they may as well be copied from the first page of a Google search.

All noteworthy insights are contained in the introduction and chapter one.