“Playing With Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World” by Kelly Clancy

Games help humans explore possibilities within constraints and with less risk than the conflicts that they simulate; a neuroscientist / physicist weaves a history from kriegspiel to LLMs.

Dear Friends,

Many of us grew up playing The Game of Life, a Hasbro board game that simulated a modern American life, from marriage to occupation to property ownership. Or perhaps you played Monopoly, a game originally designed to demonstrate the ways landlordism could corrupt a society and concentrate wealth with the very few, but later turned to glorify rentier property ownership as a superior method to attain wealth.

Games tell us a lot about ourselves.

In “Playing With Reality,” New Hampshire author Kelly Clancy covers the history of games as a way of understanding and shaping our shared reality.

When we play games, we are working through the problems in our world.

This year marks the 200th anniversary of Georg von Reisswitz’s invention of Kriegsspiel, a game that simulated combat in a realistic way to allow military officers to develop decision-making skills using maps and pieces and incomplete information. Chapter 4 ably describes how this game of pushing pieces around on maps has made warfare both more scientific and more humane. It also opened up simulations of war as a hobby, popularized by game publisher Avalon Hill, which produced incredibly detailed games with counters and tables to simulate every minute aspect of combat.

Board wargaming gave everyone an opportunity to play general, and advances in communication technology have enabled people from all around the world to play board wargames with each other. AHIKS, the Avalon Hill Intercontinental Kriegspiel Society, was founded in 1966 to spread board wargaming around the world by connecting players.¹

Table of Contents, “Playing With Reality”

Excerpt from Chapter 5, Rational Fools, read by Nicholas Sarwark:.

John von Neumann, courtesy of Los Alamos National Lab

In Chapter 5, Rational Fools, the author presents mathematician John von Neumann’s development of game theory as his way of understanding human nature from the decisions people make when playing games, an attempt to systematize the causes of the senselessness of war in Europe and the rise of antisemitism worldwide in his lifetime.

While the history of games is excellent, Clancy’s most interesting section is “Building Better Games,” where she looks closely at things like Mises and Hayek’s economic calculation problem of trying to centrally plan from localized knowledge and mechanism design, in which games are built to elicit responses from the players.

We are all players in the game of life and reading “Playing With Reality” will make you a better player and teach you things you didn’t know about the games that shape our world.

If you would like to get your own copy of “Playing With Reality,” it is available from Amazon, or you could borrow it from your local public library.

Yours truly,

Nick

1. I was recently elected Treasurer of AHIKS and think people who have an interest in board wargaming should become members, especially because it’s free!