Playing with Reality
How Games Shape Our World
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 18 Jun 2024
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- 14,99 €
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- Pre-Order
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- 14,99 €
Publisher Description
‘A book to get the neurons firing. As a passionate game player I loved reading a neuroscientist’s perspective on the role games have played in humanity’s attempts to navigate the game of life. A dopamine hit on every page’ Marcus du Sautoy
A sweeping intellectual history of games and their importance to human progress.
We play games to learn about the world, to understand our minds and the minds of others, and to practice making predictions about the future. Games are thought to be older than written language, and have now become the dominant cultural media—bigger than movies, TV, music, and literature combined. They are also fun. But as neuroscientist and physicist Kelly Clancy argues, it’s time we started taking them more seriously.
In Playing With Reality, she chronicles the riveting and hidden history of games since the Enlightenment, weaving an unexpected path through military theory, biology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and the future of democracy. Games, Clancy shows us, have been deeply intertwined 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 behaviour and brought us to the brink of annihilation—yet still underlies basic assumptions in economics, politics, and technology. 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. Games also inform the basic systems that govern our daily lives: the social media and technology that can warp our preferences, polarise us, and manufacture our desires.
Lucid, thought-provoking, and masterfully told, Playing With Reality makes the bold argument that the human fascination with games is the key to understanding our nature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Neuroscientist Clancy debuts with a sweeping investigation of the roles games have played in human history. Examining why humans are drawn to games, Clancy contends that the process of mastering them by learning rules and the possible outcomes of various moves satisfies humanity's evolutionary drive to understand cause-and-effect relationships. Tracing the influence of games from the earliest known dice (found in a 7,000-year-old Iranian settlement) through SimCity, Clancy notes that probability theory grew out of Italian scholar Gerolamo Cardano's and French mathematician Blaise Pascal's Renaissance-era writings about dice. Elsewhere, she suggests that Kaiser Wilhelm owed his battlefield success to playing Kriegsspiel (a chesslike war game with scoring based on the historical efficacy of various military tactics) as a child, and describes how chess has been used by AI researchers to measure the intelligence of software. The history fascinates, and Clancy's sophisticated analysis highlights the dangers of overgeneralizing from games to reality. For instance, she argues that game theory, which stemmed from Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann's early 20th-century musings about strategy in two-player zero-sum games, has been misapplied to real-life situations by economists who fail to recognize that the premises of von Neumann's hypothetical game (players have fixed goals and "all value can be objectively measured") don't transfer neatly to the real world. Readers won't want to put this down.