Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World

by Kelly Clancy

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780593538180

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 new work, Clancy makes the bold argument that the human fascination with games is the key to understanding our nature and our actions.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Science, Psychology, Economics, Business, Technology

368 pages, Hardcover

Published June 18, 2024

Reviews

[Cheenu · Rating 1 out of 5]

Made it to 3 chapters (70 pages)

Very interesting premise which is why I bought the book.

However, this book has no neuroscience in it at all. No descriptions of neurobiological mechanisms of the effect of games on the brain, almost no references to any studies.

All what it has is the author's speculative assertions on the role of games in human history.

For example, "divination" games such as a sorcerer using runes to tell a king when to go to war removes human biases by adding randomness.

Or gambling being a good way to get your dopamine fix as it was a neutral expected value game pre-casino era as it was played peer to peer (I very much doubt it, sharks preying on fishes has existed for as long as games of chance have).

All in all, really felt like a pointless book. Nothing to learn and not entertaining era. Just a list of the author's unsubstantiated just-so stories of role of games in human history.

[Nelson Zagalo · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book ‘Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World’ (2024) by neuroscientist Kelly Clancy, is a fascinating work that explores the intricate relationship between games and the construction of reality. In an academic but very accessible tone, Clancy takes the reader on a historical, philosophical and scientific journey, demonstrating how games, from the simplest to the most complex, have influenced and moulded societies, cultures and even the way we perceive the world, leaving some clear warnings about believing in them excessively.

Comentário em português, com excertos, no blog: https://narrativax.blogspot.com/2025/...

[CatReader · Rating 3 out of 5]

Playing with Reality is an eclectic book, based on the broad notion of games and taking deep dives into various historical games and their modern-day corollaries and implications, often with a decidedly political focus that doesn't always land. For instance, there's an entire chapter on Maxis' popular 90s franchise SimCity and how it supposedly has an extreme libertarian lean, with the only way to sustain the simulated societies being to withhold public resources, which is a terrible example for society. The 10-year-old me who enjoyed this game never thought too deeply about this - it was just a fun game to pass time, trying to beat my high score and see how long it would take before the city inevitably failed. It's like saying that since Barbie dolls were literally modeled off a Nazi-era erotic doll intended for adult men (it's true! see Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll), children playing with Barbies today are complicit in a Nazi agenda. That being said, there were some creative and interesting case studies presented.

Though this book never delved into autobiographical elements, it has a decidedly academic tone. The book's author, Kelly Clancy, has a PhD in biophysics from UC Berkeley and has since branched off into writing.

Further reading: similar deep dives
The Fast: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Promise of Doing Without by John Oakes
Smoke and Ashes: A Writer's Journey through Opium's Hidden Histories by Amitav Ghosh
The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett

My statistics:
Book 212 for 2024
Book 1815 cumulatively

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s easier to pretend to think you understand the world than it is to know reality. We use games to misshape our reality and we are easily manipulated by those who play us for the fools that we are.

Rational discourse within common boundaries of reason is assumed as we move through the world. The game we think we are playing assumes other players who are playing within the rules of the game itself. That is wrongheaded and dangerous. The author highlights how people like Trump and Jordan Peterson take advantage by re-orienting reality and slipping in lies, hate and false realities by taking advantage of our inability to adjust to their violations of the norms.

The author notes AI’s generative power techniques and how that limits its ability to escape the prison that it’s trapped in. It’s only as good as the data it exploits through clever interpolations while extrapolations beyond the data lead to humans being classified as gorillas because of inability of assessing skin tones.

Heidegger knows that we are thrown into the world and our authenticity gets sublimated by distractions, background and “the they” which takes us away from our ownmost being. This book provides the analogy as well as the proper way to understand how we stumble away from authentic self. Remember Heidegger became a die-in-the-wool Nazi because he thought the state through politics was the focal point. Our focal point should not be an ideology of making-America-great-again through false manipulations of the models we use to play the game.

Hannah Arendt (a student of Heidegger who was Jewish and anti-Nazi) realized that sometimes we like to just play chess for the sake of playing chess and that the Nazis couldn’t understand that since they had redefined the game such that only the race-based nation-state matters for them. Arendt also coined the phrase “banality of evil,” and the Jordan Petersons and Trump sycophants are mediocre in abilities while gifted in misshaping the game and creating false realities.

Our models we use to simulate reality and predictions for our world get misshaped by our heuristics and are easily manipulated by emotional bombardment. As we are playing within the rules of chess, the malignant narcissist picks up his pieces across the board and declares victory and says the rules don’t matter and re-forms reality. This book shows the matrix we are trapped in and acts as a warning by explaining how we lose our authenticity.

[Mark F]

The dopamine system encodes an animal's reward predictions. The activity of dopamine neurons reflects whether an animal receives more or less of a reward than expected. As neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky puts it, dopamine is "about the pursuit of happiness, rather than happiness itself."

Planning can be thought of as the brain running reinforcement learning on imagined experiences. "Learning and planning," Sutton writes, "are fundamentally the same process, operating in the one case on real experience, and in the other on simulated experience from a predictive model of the world." Likewise, this may also explain the phenomenon of regret, which can be thought of as a form of learning. Memories are data the brain can train on again and again. Rumination is the brain linking mistakes made in the past to negative outcomes experienced much later. Thought commonly thought of as an emotion, regret might be better framed as a computational principle. This process can become pathologic, however, as in the case of people with PTSD.

Chance was once believed to relay the will of God, to be the means through which the sacred plane pierced into the mundane world. Humans attempted to contact that power through augury rituals, intuitively linking the unknowability of dice rolls with the unknowability of the future. Divination features prominently in most cultures known to history, so why would humans across millenia cling to magic if it never worked? Omar Khayyam Moore forwarded another interpretation: what if magic _did_ work, just not in the way it purported to? He refers to practices of the Innu poeple of the Labrador Peninsula. They regularly consulted gods on pragmatic, existential matters, like determining the direction in which they should hunt for game. This method was reserved for times of uncertainty, when the consultant had no reliable information about where their prey might be. Moore invites his readers to conduct a thought experiment. Without divination, what would influence the direction they chose for the hunt? Personal preferences, likely biased by previous successes. Divination was a randomization technology. The method helped the Innu avoid fixed patterns for their hunting strategies, rendering them less predictable to prey.

Randomness was one of humanity's earliest cognitive aids. Humans across the globe discovered methods for generating chance events with instruments like bones, cards, and dice. The word _forecast_ originally referred to divination of the future by casting lots. The Bible depicts Israelites drawing lots to make important decisions, ranging from military drafts to distributing Israel's territories among tribes. Although the practice of divination was widespread, most religions restricted who was allowed to interpret its results. The greek word _kleros_, meaning "lot, chance," gave rise to the word _clergy_. God may not play dice, as Albert Einstein famously asserted, but sometimes dice play God.

Psychologists Patrick Anselme and Mike J.F. Robinson suggest that unpredictable phenomena elicit a strong dopamine response because this motivates animals to persevere in the face of failure. Food foraging is a skill necessary for all motile animals and is thought to have played a fundamental role in the evolution of the brain. It's an inherently uncertain enteprise. As a result, the brain treats unpredictability with particular sensitivity. In the wild, rewards are often random and rare. Animals who give up easily are unlikely to survive. This explains the counter-intuitive finding that problematic gamblers often gamble even harder after a string of losses. The dopamine response motivates an unlucky forager to keep trying. This is related to what's known as the explore/exploit trade-off. A forager should know when to keep exploiting a winning strategy and when to give up and search for something new. Evolution endowed our minds with a fascination for uncertainty to help us more thoroughly map our environment. People were drawn to understand chance, and ultimately invent probability theory, by their biology. This also makes us vulnerable to it: people and animals with dopamine disorders are suboptimal foragers. Schizophrenic patients with disordered dopamine, for instance, are biased to explore more than exploit.

Surprise can be a learning trigger, orienting an animal's attention and sharpening its memory. It signals that there is something more to understand. This may have been useful throughout evolution, incentivizing animals to explore novel stimuli and learn as-yet-unlearned associations. Psychologists have found that people's brains respond to new information in the same way they respond to standard rewards like food and money.

Uncertainty is a significant part of what makes any game enjoyable. Game designer Greg Costikyan notes that most adults don't play tic-tac-toe because they already know its winning strategies. Young children, on the other hand, still enjoy it because they haven't fully explored its outcomes. Uncertainty undergirds the pleasures of storytelling, of sports, of courtship. But it's also one of our deepest horrors: being blindsided by terrorist attacks, freak accidents, betrayals. Games sanitize and soften the realm of the unexpected, allowing us to explore and enjoy uncertainty in a nonthreatening way.

In game theory, a player's preferences can be divined by the choices they make. In reality, many of us make choices out of necessity, not desire. In countries where wages have not kept up with the cost of living, peole might "choose" an exploitative workplace because it's their only option. Pare a person's options down enough, push them to the brink of subsistence, and see whether they can still honor their true values. People may be compelled, by economic or social pressures, to make choices that don't reflect their true preferences, then are told that these forced choices mean something about human nature. "The market," Binmore writes, "is therefore the final step in a process that first leaches out the moral content of a culture and then erodes the autonomy of its citizens by shaping their personal preferences." Game theory posits humans as a fixed bundle of preferences, when they are, in fact, learning systems.

Let's consider the zero-sum bias. People across the globe tend to believe that all resources are limited, even when this is not the case. An isolationist might oppose immigration because they think that immigrants "steal" from a fixed number of available jobs, not realizing that immigrants also drive economic growth and create new jobs. A fervent nationalist might believe that any progress made in another country necessarily translates to their own being worse off, rather than sharing in those benefits. A racist might conclude that any assistance given to other groups necessarily translates to a loss for their own. Zero-sum thinking results in antagonism between individuals and groups, and it can drive people to justify immoral behaviors or make bad decisions based on incorrect assumptions, as it blinkers them to win-win solutions. White support for government assistance programs started dropping in the mid 1960s, once Black Americans stood to be beneficiaries as well. McGhee relates this to psychology research indicating that people are more concerned with their relative position than with their absolute well-being.

One of the concerns shared by philosophers naturalists, sociologists, poets, soldiers, and civilians alike is humankind's "true" nature. Perhaps the historical lack of consensus should itself be a lesson: our nature has been hard to pin down because it isn't fixed. Our hallmark quality is plasticity. We are, to borrow a phrase from historian Johan Huizinga, Homo ludens, man the player. We slip in and out of identities, value systems, and agencies they way players inhabit the strictures of a game.

Evolving animals are not only adapting to their sterile, static environments--they're adapting to one another. New behaviors and strategies emerged to counter those of other players, eventually resulting in a runaway intelligence explosion that led to modern humans. The complexity of an environment limits the level of intelligence that its inhabitants can attain. One can be a genius chess player, but there's no such thing as a tic-tac-toe prodigy.

Price's notion that selection acts on ideas presaged Richard Dawkin's memes: ideas as entities that compete for mental and cultural representation. The philosopher Karl Popper also likens the acquisition and generation of knowledge to biological selection, describing the process as "evolutionary epistemology." New ideas are like genetic mutations. However, Price failed at his goal of discovering the biological basis for pure selflessness. The Price equation indicates that altruistic behaviors will be favored over time so long as they sufficiently benefit the population overall.

Altruism is just as inevitable a consequence of natural selection as selfishness. All that matters is whether these traits increase their bearer's fitness; it's a fundamentally selfish selflessness. Inherent in our conception of altruism is a notion of sacrifice, of loss. It's not _genuine_ altruism if something is gained. Perhaps a more hopeful framing, however, is to marvel that the structure of life is such that, by helping others, one may also help oneself. No creature is an island; no one is divisible from the greater whole.

In 1977, the game theorist Edan Ullman-Margalit published _The Emergence of Norms_, in which she argues that social norms emerged to enforce cooperation. Ideals like honor and camaraderie bind artillerymen to their duties and ensure optimal outcome. Acting in accordance with one's values oftern feels like a reward of its own, and this is exactly how norms might change the reward payoff. This suggests a potential solution to a great mystery of humanity's past: the rise of large-scale cooperation. In smaller groups with little anonymity, norms can be easily enforced. But for larger-scale social experiments like cities, people had to find ways to trust strangers they didn't know and with whom they might never interact again. Several scholars have suggested that the belief in omniscient, punishing gods replaced gossip to serve this function. After all, watched people, as the saying goes, are nice people. People internalized the threat of gossip as conscience and self-policed to avoid displeasing the divine. But this solution isn't feasible in the pluralistic societies of today. Citizens subscribe to diverse cultural and religious beliefs. In the mid-twentieth century, philosopher John Rawls began a line of inquiry that culminated in his celebrated 1971 treatise, _A Theory of Justice_. In this work, he posits fairness as the foundational principle, or "first virtue." In Rawl's thought experiment, citizens are locked in a bargaining ritual to decide on a fair and moral framework for society. All members are purely self interested. How, then, can participants ensure that the benefits of society are fairly distributed to everyone involved? Rawl's solution: they should bargain behind a veil of ignorance, where no one knows their position in society. Bargainers are incentivized to build a society that leaves no one behind. Rawls had made an argument, stripped of all sentimentality, that social goods should be distributed as evenly as possible across society. Unfortunately, his ideas have been embraced in theory but not in practice. This is exactly what happened with trickle-down, maximax economic policies, which have been the explicit mandate of conservative politicians for decades. Though the policies have only served to worsen wealth inequality, many voters still seem to believe in them enough to vote, against their own self-interest.

Fairness can be thought of as a heuristic that helps people choose among infinite feasible strategies the one that benefits the largest number of players. Morals, in other words, are just smart game plays. Because the fair solution is a stable equilibrium, we don't need to invent concepts like religion to steady the social contract.

The roboticist Hans Moravec observed that the skills researchers initially expected to be hard to automate, like chess play, were easier than engineering "unthinking" skills like walking. In recent years, generative models have made progress toward automating art and writing, yet we're still years away from automating hard labor. People once imagined that robots would shoulder everyday drudgery, leaving us to create art and poetry. Instead, the reverse has happened.

Mechanism design is the science of regulation. Its rules are devised to keep players honest. Enforcement mechanisms can look like physical commitment devices, such as one-way traffic spikes that prevent cars from using unauthorized exits.
Commitment devices are important because they make other players more predictable. The philosopher Don Ross gives the example of a pair of poachers aiming to bag a rare antelope. For their plan to work, one must flush the antelop toward their partner, who will kill and load it onto their truck. Nothing prevents the second poacher from driving away at this point, bagging the enitre trophy for himself. So why would they cooperate at all? A commitment device could look like this. The first poacher rigs the truck with an alarm that only he can trigger. If the second poacher drives off without him, he can sound the alarm, causing both to get caught. Strangely, this arrangement is preferable, because it makes both poachers' promises to cooperate credible, allowing them to confidently pull off the crime. Mechanism design increasingly permeates our lives. It suffuses the internet. LinkedIn has formalized the labor market. Rideshare apps match riders with (nominally vetted) drivers. Subtle tweaks to a platform's rules can elicit different participant behaviors. The dating app Bumble solves a common problem--female users being swamped by low-effort messages--by requiring female users to message first.

Reputation is a common commitment device. Yet trust is increasingly hard to come by. With the advent of the internet, the public sphere has grown privatized, and software now mediates our experience of formerly organic interactions, turning human connections into a marketplace. Behaviors that were once verboten are more common within largely anyonmous environments where poor behavior is unlikely to affect a user's reputation in other spheres.

[Elizabeth Severance · Rating 4 out of 5]

John and I listened to this on our road trip- finishing most of it today. It definitely helped the 9 hours of driving go more quickly. John found it, and I thought it looked interesting. (Though the most important question he asked before suggesting an audiobook was what speed I listen, which is 1.75, to which he sighed in relief).

This book was thought-provoking (and slightly scary about the future of AI and game theory) though not quite what we were expecting. We thought it would be more an analysis of different video games, but it was more a history of game theory and all the terrifying ways games and game theory has impacted history.

Since we listened, I don’t have any underlines, but two main thoughts stuck with me. One is about dopamine and its release in games- but how it also diminishes over time. (Maybe weirdly) It made me think of dieting and the dopamine releases at first and then diminishing over time, because diets are if nothing else a game (where no one wins).

Second- this insight about game theory: she writes about how humans deviating from prediction is used to say humans aren’t rational instead of saying it’s not a good theory to predict human behavior or decisions. It’s almost like these models need to be revised in light of other motivations and factors…

[Phoebe · Rating 3 out of 5]

It started out amusing enough but quickly turned dark & grim when the focus became game theory.

[Dale · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awesome, just awesome. The author shows us how we use games to test facts and assumptions in life and also how games sometimes shape the way we see the world. I recommend this book because all will find it interesting but my planner friends will find utility in the examples and pitfalls.

[Matt Hutson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to love this but it was just not the right book for me at this time. Maybe if I were more into game theory, mathematics, and the history of games, I would have liked it more. I wanted more psychology and bigger picture impact, and less jargon about game theory. Anyway, the portion of the book I did read had some interesting insights. I'll update my thoughts about it soon.

[Jason · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Games / game theory works... unless it goes against my obvious political bias, then it is bad"

This is is just another contradictory book that quotes 'evidence' that games / game theory works for things the author believes in but rejects the exact same evidence when it goes against what they believe.

And these bias's get worse and worse as the book goes on.

[Kelsea Walsh · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book explores games and game theory’s impact on the world around us - from scientific discovery to military engagements. Kelly Clancy is absolutely brilliant and her writing is informative but accessible. I deeply enjoyed this book and would recommend to anyone interested in economics, science, and understanding the world around us.

[B. Rule · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a really interesting topic and Clancy has some good bits chewing the fat of her subtitle. There's stuff you would expect (e.g., gamification leading to enshittification of tech) but also cool capsule histories of things like war games and chess- and Go-playing computer programs. There are extensive endnotes, but they're not referenced in the text (at least of the Kindle version), so lots of the text feels like "get a blog"-level screeds. This is especially so because it's pretty repetitive: Clancy's point is that game theory took over the world not because it is an accurate description of it, but because it makes complicated stuff computable. The map is not the territory, and Clancy pounds that dead horse into paste.

I completely agree with her that game theorists defined terms (like "rational") based on what they could measure and then promptly forgot that they never verified those definitions by reference to an external reality. Thus, we have geopolitics, economics, et al. reduced to a prisoner's dilemma, zero-sum game analysis even though we see often that approach fracture on the rocks of actuality. As Ostrom's Law (quoted by Clancy) has it: “A resource arrangement that works in practice can work in theory,” and the inexorable logic of mutually assured destruction has not (so far) resulted in apocalypse because decisionmakers have heretofore realized that various other values, tools, and concerns trump the schematized logic that obligates you to bomb your opponent into oblivion. In short, game theory thinking is not human thinking, but we keep dangerously pushing the former to supplant the latter. Thank goodness Stanislav Petrov wasn't a game theorist.

Despite the hortatory value of Clancy's project, it is a frustrating read because it keeps perseverating on this point without necessarily elaborating on it. Further, Clancy uses a very broad sense of game theory (without clearly defining it), such that this jeremiad seemingly applies to any mathematically-informed decision analysis. It weakens her point and makes a fascinating topic a little boring. I still liked this book but wish it had been better.

[CJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a more serious book than I was expecting for a book about games. But it’s quite rich, lots of descriptions of Nobel economists’ research, history of game theory, concepts of rationality, neuroscience, development of war games/simulations in the 1800s. Chess unsurprisingly gets a good amount of attention. I was going to complain there was no mention of Settlers of Catan, but Clancy thwarted me with two brief mentions. No mention of Ticket to Ride.

Would be interested in another book that focuses on storytelling and creativity in the development of games. Came across a Clancy interview with Good Life Project where Clancy highlights the link between games and human projects of imagination of rules for how things could work, in playful ways.

[Juliette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating : 4 ⭐
I enjoyed this book quite a lot. It did a good job at explaining the uses of game theory, while also showing how people get stuck in unproductive ways of thinking because of their reliance on it. I feel like I gained a new perspective on the topic. The audiobook narrator did a good job.

[Tavo · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 ⭐️

An easy read with plenty of intriguing points about how games have influenced evolution and shaped our history. It doesn’t go into great depth on any single topic, but instead offers a broad exploration of games’ potential and their historical significance. Still, it’s an enjoyable read for anyone curious about game theory in general.

[Stanislav Stanchev · Rating 3 out of 5]

One should not judge a book by its cover. Still, there is something about an enticing book cover. In the case of Playing with Reality – How Games Shape Our World, I was not only attracted to the colours and the playful juxtaposition of title and subtitle. What made me smile was the author’s bio on the inside of the dust cover: “Kelly Clancy, PhD, is a neuroscientist and physicist who has held research positions at MIT, Berkeley, University College London and DeepMind. She develops novel brain-computer interfaces with the aim of understanding the principles of intelligence. Her writing has appeared in Wired, Harper’s and The New Yorker. She spent her childhood being repeatedly murdered by her sisters in the video game GoldenEye 007.”

Perfect, I thought as I smiled at that last sentence. This book will be full of interesting neuroscience insights, but with that tongue-in-cheek reference at the end, the author clearly gets games as well. Let’s see how she presents the argument that “the human fascination with games is the key to understanding our nature”, as the less original and more traditionally pop sciency blurb on the front of the dust cover states.

I have to admit that the book’s ambition is both greater and smaller than I anticipated when I received it as a Christmas present under the tree. I mostly expected a chronological study of games from ancient times (dice, chess, Go) through newer inventions like playing cards and the roulette to the current state of designer board games and addictive-by-design “free” mobile games. The ambition is greater than expected because the 300-odd pages deal with themes as diverse as anthropology, neuroscience, military theory, nuclear weapons, economics, evolutionary biology, AI, and crypto currencies. It is smaller than expected because individual games as such feature only sporadically and mostly in support of other arguments. In other words, the seemingly genuine experience of having a good time with GoldenEye 007 does not shine through at all. Instead, it is the curious and well-read neuroscientist on a crusade against game theory that shines through very well indeed.

Terrific opening moves

Playing with Reality starts off very well. I was immediately captured by Clancy’s project. The first chapters deal with the importance of games in a cultural and anthropological sense. Not in a fully predictable and chronological manner, but in a constantly shifting balance between science, culture and history.

Clancy explores the human fascination (and utility) of randomness and chance as a scientific endeavor (Italian scholar Gerolamo Cardano wrote the earliest known treatment of probability, Liber de ludo aleae in the 16th century). She also points out the social implications of games of chance (Cardano gambled his family into poverty on at least one occasion and allegedly wrote his treatise to better be able to cheat at games of dice).

The subject is also looked at from a neuroscientist’s perspective by describing the importance of uncertainty to learning and development (“Studies in human subjects indicate that, in gamblers and non-gamblers alike, dopamine release tracks a stimuli’s unpredictability more closely than it tracks reward.”). Clancy even quotes studies showcasing anthropological and political uses of games: From animal bones as a source of “true randomness” to guide hunter/gatherers away from over-exploiting certain areas to chess as an organizational principle in society (each piece/class/caste has an important role to play).

Middlegame muddled by repetition

Moving away from general observations and surprising insights on dopamine, the development of science and games as metaphors in early modernity, Clancy then devotes a few chapters on the growing role of wargames (“Kriegsspiel” in particular) as a tool in military preparation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. That is used as somewhat of a bridge to what I consider to be the core of Playing with Reality: Game theory and its many flaws, as Clancy sees them.

The reader is taken on a lengthy ride regarding the invention, development, criticism, infectiousness and lasting impact of game theory. Not as in chess theory on openings and endgames but as in the mathematical treatment of decision-making as pioneered by scientists like John von Neumann.

I believe that the enjoyment and payoff from these chapters will depend on the reader’s prior knowledge of game theory. Writing from an American perspective, where game theory is a particularly dominant framework, I believe Clancy is somewhat justified in explaining, demystifying and repeatedly critiquing the subject. My own exposure to game theory in university was quite nuanced from the very start. Its advantages and drawbacks laid bare already in the first year of political science at the University of Copenhagen (and explored further afterwards). I unashamedly based my own master’s thesis on a game theoretical model of state interaction – not because I believed it would truly say something about the real world, but because it is a neat framework for a research project (indeed, I supplemented the game theoretical analysis with a case study, which did not fit the statistical findings very well at all to no surprise of anyone).

In short, I found Clancy’s lengthy treatment of game theory to be full of repetition – not least of her own (justified!) criticisms of the paradigm. Von Neumann is introduced on page 89, and his shadow lingers upon the remaining 220 pages that are for the most part dedicated to game theory and its good and bad impacts on science, technology and society.

If the reader is not well-versed in this particular subject, I do think Playing with Reality has a lot to offer. And the extent of game theory’s reach in economics and other fields is truly startling. Personally, however, the repetitive focus on game theory made the book’s second half far less enjoyable than its first. It did not help that the unavoidable chapter on chess-playing AI also felt old as only last month I read Kasparov’s Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins, which covered the development of AI in the context of chess in great detail. All this to say that I felt my reading experience tinged with tedium, which may be reproduced in only a minority of readers!

Despite this doom and gloom, the second half of Playing with Reality still had interesting insights. A memorable variation of Clancy’s critique of game theory’s frequent assumptions of human rationality is expressed thus:

Players behave differently in a prisoner’s dilemma depending on how it’s presented to them. If it’s called the Wall Street Game, players are more likely to defect. If it’s called the Community Game, they’re more likely to cooperate. (p. 120)

The importance of norms in human development is very well-put by the author. And yes, game theory is only useful with the right assumptions, the right context and the right usage. Being aware of its limitations is necessary – and over-reliance on it is problematic (as many examples in the book highlight). However, Clancy is more nuanced than I give her credit for. For instance, she devotes a chapter on the positive intellectual influence of game theory (as a concept) to the development of modern theories on evolutionary biology. I had read Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene and it had a big impact on me. Clancy delves into the giants upon whose shoulders Dawkins stands and gives game theory its due credit as an instrument, when used well.

Fumbles the endgame

The latter chapters deal to some extent with the gamification of contemporary society (from Duolingo to Uber ratings etc.). I was disappointed to find that attention yet again returned to game theory and its impact on e.g. the design of Google’s advertisement auctions. had hoped for recent studies on how video, online, role-playing, and board games affect today’s children and young people. Yes, Clancy quotes that tech companies, influencers and disinformation campaigns exploit how dopamine fires in relation to new and surprising information (whether it is true or not).

But that happens in passing, and the cultural and neurological impact of games (good or bad) in the post-1980s is left completely unexplored. Clancy focuses, in my opinion, too tightly on the direct impact of games (such as SimCity as a society simulator used even in electoral campaigns) and not enough on the indirect impact of games: What are the benefits and pitfalls of people who develop genuine communities around games like World of Warcraft? Are there studies that shed light on changing patterns when we moved from offline console games to online gaming to mobile gaming with horrible things like loot boxes to a growing “reactionary return” to physical board games? These questions are not only left unanswered, they are not even posed by Playing with Reality and I think it is a shame.

A good book for most – a slight disappointment for me

Overall, I still recommend Playing with Reality. It is mostly well-written and contains many nuggets of surprising or interesting information (Clancy knows how to fire up that dopamine, I guess). Its focus on society and science means that the book probably has a much broader appeal than if it stuck more closely to a study of actual games. For that reason, however, I do feel that the tiny references to a Call of Duty here or a Settlers of Catan there feel contrived and dishonest. Game theory takes centre stage – mostly as the villain.

To finish on a positive note, I really did like this quote from the book, which actually touches a nerve with an avid board gamer like myself. It truly summarizes my experience of playing games with my friends and family:

The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen highlights a central aspect of play: though players locked in a game are nominally competing – even in a zero-sum game like chess – they are really cooperating to compete. Players agree to suspend rules of reality for a specific period, adhere to the rules of a game, and work together to achieve the shared goal of an enjoyable time. (p. 161)

[P J M]

Recently I have been thinking too much about a JRPG. I have always been aware that those games are embarrassingly formative for me, more responsible for my self-managerial, sentimental progressivism than anyone in my life. Sometimes, like when I am home, this is screamingly obvious. It only took me two weeks at my parents’ to ask someone “what the real world word for social link is again.”

It is terrible that people like me run the world. The word I was looking for was “friend.”

[Zella · Rating 3 out of 5]

DNF, because I knew everything this book covered already and therefore was bored. This would be an okay read for someone less familiar with the subject matter.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wide-ranging - I learned a lot.

[Raymond A. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Games covered: Chess, Checkers, Go, plus three lines on Monopoly. Reads like the author sat in a game theater class in B-school and didn’t like it much.

Key takeaways: People (and pack animals) like playing. People cheat at games. Corporations (which are just large groups of people) cheat even more.

[Chloe Kirk · Rating 4 out of 5]

It has great parallels to my Science Reads a couple months back, the Anxious Generation - the power of play in human development.

Dr. Kelly Clancy is a neuroscientist and physicist (how cool is that?) studying how games have shaped how we generate knowledge and reason about the unknown. Clancy purports games are a way humans separate themselves from animals - “while play is how animals explore their bodily agency, games are how people explore their mental agency.”

Clancy spends the majority of the book discussing the history of games, specifically game theory. I particularly enjoyed her use of game theory to explain how cancer is treated, doctors use dynamic strategies of game-theoretic modeling to target the ever changing cancer. While game theory has many advantages, Clancy argues a key difference between game theory and reality is “in game theory, a player’s preferences can be divined by the choices they make[, while] in reality, many of the choices we make are out of necessity and not desire.”

A main premise of the book is that humans should not rely on game theory as heavily as we do. When talking about the technologies developed from World War II, “Game theorists sought universal solutions in abstract mathematics, and the world is worse off for our leaders’ faith in their technocratic solutions.” Games are constrained by clear rules that the real world lacks. They can be helpful to model or predict, but when applying them to more complicated questions, like universal healthcare, the clear rules become a limitation. “People aren’t mathematical objects.”

I give this book 4⭐️/5 only because I was hoping for more reflection about AI and how we use games to train AI to think like humans. Clancy does touch on this briefly at the end - is true intelligence the best moves during a chess game, or is it what invents a game like chess? - but I was really hoping for more of a deep dive on the burgeoning data harvesting from online games and social media, how we have “gamify-ed” technology and its implications in misinformation and mental health. Clancy is clearly thinking about all of this too as she does mention all these points, but I’d say this book is focused more on the history of games than how we use them today.

Quite a fun read (had me picking up Wingspan after reading this) and highly recommend reading with the Anxious Generation!

[Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Not every situation is zero sum, yet this has become a pervasive worldview and an overused metaphor for personal and political relationships, undermining trust and hindering the cooperation that’s been so crucial to humankind’s success. Game theory itself is not to blame for the zero-sum bias—von Neumann simply described a specific class of game when he coined the phrase. People harbored some version of this bias long before mathematicians formalized the concept. But because of game theory’s privileged position in the halls of academia, people may mistake this folk notion for established truth and use game theory to justify or excuse their distorted views.”

This book focuses more on the influence of games than the games themselves, and does include rather a lot of ranting about game theory and why it shouldn’t be used to model anything in the real world. Also a reasonable amount of ranting about AI, and some interesting insights into the evolution of game-playing machines like AlphaGo (Clancy was a researcher for Deepmind at one point).
It is an engaging read - lots of interesting insights into a range of topics, from how randomised decision making (corresponding with the invention of dice) is a uniquely human trait, that underpinned lots of social evolutions, through to the way that curiosity and dopamine interact (Clancy contends that dopamine encourages us to explore and stretch boundaries, behaviours which can underpin compulsive gambling or video game addiction, where exploration and pursuit are endless, hampering our capacity to actually do things - this sounds dumb in my summary but is much better put in the book). Clancy views games as an inevitable part of being human (but not exclusively so), but also raises warning bells about how anything we like can be designed to make it difficult to disengage, exploiting rather than enhancing, our biology.
I would have appreciated more on actual games, and the diffuse focus makes it a bit of everything, but it is a good read that will provide plenty of conversation topics, not just for gamers

[ANTHONY CUTLER · Rating 2 out of 5]

Poor stuff overall. Much has been written, in an academic and popular vein, about Game Theory. What I had hoped would be distinctive here was that Clancy holds herself out as a neuroscientist. The dual paradigms of neuroscience and game theory yielding insight into human motivation and decision making was tantalising.

And we get a hint of that in Chapter 2. After the usual bit of "What I am going to tell you" in Chapter 1, Clancy hints at something important. She "tells" us about a correspondence between algorithms used in machine learning and cellular physiochemical processes in human brains. A book setting out an account of this, at a general reader level, "showing" the evidence, exploring it, and giving us some detail and history of the detail, would have been well worth while. Books on this level have been written. I refer to some of them below.

With all due respect to Clancy, I have a suspicion that what I wanted is the book she wanted to write. But some editor thought it wouldn't sell and guided Clancy into this lukewarm rehash.

The book then turns into a routine survey of risk, game theory and decision science, marred by advocacy for Clancy's own politics.

I should also add that I got little feeling of an authorial voice here: fact, fact, unsupported assertion, fact ...

Far better popular accounts of this material are already out there. I would recommend Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation, Ten Great Ideas about Chance and many others by authors who weren't overawed by their editors.

What has saved the 2 stars, and was the significant takeaway from the book, new to me, is a few paragraphs in the first substantive chapter. A book dedicated to that. Please?!? Give Clancy a chance.

[Stephen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found it really difficult to get on with this book. I found it to be overly academic in style and abstract in content. This was disappointing because the chapter headings suggested that I was in for a treat. Instead, I found the book hard work. I don't mind hard work as long as the payback warrants the investment of time and effort. I'm afraid to say that, in this case, it didn't for me.

I was OK with the large degree of Game Theory that the book contains. However, I did find it a bit repetitive at times. The author managed to lead us along an argument, but then left us to our own devices before reaching a conclusion. This was quite frustrating. I am sympathetic to the idea that games shape our world, but I don't quite think that this book adequately makes the case for that view.

The writing style was very academic, which made reading the book very laborious. It is very hard work. I worked my way through the first section, which was heavy with neuroscience and dopamine effects, to get to the second, which opens with Kriegspiel. I was excited by that prospect because this is what I wanted from the book. Sadly, the exhilaration didn't last long as we tended back towards a dry exposition of what it means - in game terms - to be rational.

All in all, I found the book to be very disappointing. I didn't quite get on with the subjects covered and I found the writing tedious. I find it hard to know what to recommend the book for. If you are looking for an academic text on gaming, the content will disappoint you. If you are looking for an introduction to gaming, the writing style is very dense and abstract. The book seems to have the worst of all worlds.

[Jorge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kelly Clancy’s Playing with Reality is a provocative exploration of how games and simulations influence our understanding of the world, but it often prioritizes rhetoric over rigor. While the book raises important concerns about the limitations of game theory and the incentives driving modern systems, it is marked by a strong ideological bias and a loose approach to scientific accuracy.

Early on, Clancy claims that “irrational numbers cannot be precisely determined” (p. 5)—a mathematically false statement that, so early in the text, casts doubt on the seriousness and reliability of what follows. In the closing paragraph, she portrays markets as dominated by “rapacious business interests” that “cannibalize useful companies” while “relentlessly squeezing” workers and consumers—language that leans heavily into polemic rather than balanced analysis.

Clancy aims to critique the dangers of a gamified lens on reality, yet she offers no real alternative. Instead, she tends to blame game theory itself for human behaviors she deems harmful, overlooking both the utility and predictive power of such models when properly contextualized. Of course, game theory is based on simplified representations of reality, but this does not make the models meaningless—only in need of careful interpretation. The book would have benefited from a more grounded treatment and input from experts in the relevant scientific fields.

I struggled between 3 and 4 stars, but it’s definitely worth reading and provocative, so I’m finally going with 4 ⭐️.

[Marks54 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kelly Clancy is a young neuroscientist, physicist, and whatnot who has written a really good new book attempting to provide a popularly based history of how people have attempted to study games as well as evaluate claims that studying games intensively can provide a solid basis for studying how people work through information based problems that require interactions with other people.

The result is a general account that that ranges from chess, checkers, go, and other variants to efforts to computerize game playing, to the establishment of mathematical gaming in economics as game theory, to a wide range of current efforts to study advanced topics like artificial intelligence. Ms. Clancy does a good job with this, but the burden for this book is not just to master the overall narrative but also to stake out an evaluative position on what game theory has accomplished, whether game theory has been contributions to new knowledge in economics or social science more generally, and whether game theory is helping change how we think about and learn about games. While Ms. Clancy has much to say about game theory, she is also unsparing about its limitations.

I won’t go into detail on her critique, but students receiving an introductory survey of game theory should keep these critiques handy. There is much good to be learned from game theory, although such learning should also recognize its limitations, Game theory is at best a tool - a potentially very complicated one. Students should learn it along with its limitations.

More to Follow on this.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

"In recent years, generative models have made progress toward automating art and writing, yet we're still years away from automating hard labour. People once imagined that robots would shoulder everyday drudgery, leaving us to create art and poetry. Instead, the reverse happened."

I picked up this book in the delusion it was about board or video games. It is a bit, but really mostly about game theory - my bad. But this book, especially the first part, turned out to be amazing. I highlighted more than in any other book I've read this year. The author does such a good job at writing a cohesive, yet nuanced and comprehensive story about a subject that is quite abstract.

The first part is the most interesting - towards the end, some parts get repetitive and I noticed myself reading just to finish the book, which was a totally different experience than the beginning of the book. Overall, really neat, and I would recommend reading a few chapters.

[Daniel Barrows · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is book serves only to provide fodder for the curious, and leaves the reader no wiser. While this book covers some interesting subjects, it doesn't have much of a point. The points it makes are incomplete and unsatisfying.

I was particularly interested in its discussion of how people behave differently when playing a game like Monopoly than they do in real life. Clancy observes that games create incentive structures, rewarding certain behaviors and accordingly shaping the behavior of their participants. Thus players behavior tells us more about the incentive structures of the game than it does about either the players, or the behavior of humans outside of the game. In my mind, the interesting part here is to explore how the incentive structures in the real world are different from those in Monopoly, but the author seemed satisfied to argue simply that we shouldn't trust game theory or simulations to tell us anything useful. Disappointing.

[Charles Reed · Rating 3 out of 5]

54%

You might not realize this, but when you write a book like this, it gives people more fuel to say that women can't write non-emotional, opinionated books. Especially towards the ending half, it got really opinionated. It started saying things like, it's morally wrong to do this. Why? How? You're saying the gamification of the workforce is bad. Why? You're saying we shouldn't make games out of everything. Why? It's a very unique thought process, and this points for uniqueness, not for credibility or replication. I understand that you feel this way. I don't understand why I should feel that way, or why anyone else should feel this way. What is wrong with gamifying things and having fun and using that as a spur for change? I mean, if you're using it maliciously, that's your fault for being malicious about things. Nothing wrong with gamifying everything in theory or practice.

[Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE GAME IS THE GAME. ALWAYS.
This book is a VERY DEEP dive into the many factors behind, and the (mostly bad) far reaching implications of the gradual "gamification" of our lives. The author does a very good job articulating how these patterns and tools came about, why they are used, and how it has led to many problems we face in our complicated world. Models of reality are not necessarily reality, and when you try to "game the system," while you might win according to the game (test scores, crime stats, short term monetary gains), by the most important metrics you lose. It is a sad pattern to see repeated in so many different facets of life, yet this is where we are. Great book, I LOVE deep dives like this that aren't full of anecdotes and a few main points.