Playing with Reality

How Games Have Shaped Our World

By: Kelly Clancy

Narrated by: Patty Nieman

Length: 12 hrs

Publisher's summary

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.

©2024 Kelly Clancy (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“Absorbing. . . . A revealing look at the hidden role that games have played in human development for centuries.” —Kirkus

“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

“Playing With Reality is as surprising, and as delightful, as the many games it analyzes. From ancient games of chance to the latest advances in AI, Kelly Clancy has written the definitive account of how we—as individuals and as a society—learn through play.” —Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad Is Good for You and Wonderland

“With the blazing mind of a scientist and the keen eye of a poet, Clancy emerges as one of the most important new writers of her generation.” —David Eagleman, Stanford neuroscientist and author of Incognito and Livewired

“A gripping narrative that reveals why games matter and just how powerful they can be. It should be required reading for anyone who develops games and everyone who plays them.” —Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, Inc.