Playing with Reality

Playing with Reality is an intellectual history of games and the part they have played in human progress. Kelly Clancy starts from the idea that people play games to learn about the world, to understand their own minds and other people's, and to predict the future. Games are a powerful way of modeling reality, and they are also fun. The danger comes when we confuse the model worlds of games with reality itself and let gamification take over our decision making.

The book follows the history of games from the Enlightenment onward. Its path runs through military theory, political science, evolutionary biology, the development of computers and AI, neuroscience and cognitive psychology. Clancy is a neuroscientist and physicist.

Her examples show how closely games have been tied to the course of history. War games influenced the outcomes of real wars in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe. Game theory distorted our understanding of human behavior and helped bring the world to the brink of annihilation, yet it still underlies basic assumptions in economics, politics and technology design. Games have been used to teach computers to learn on their own, and now games are being designed that will shape society and the future of democracy.

Clancy argues that our fascination with games is the key to understanding human nature and why we act as we do.