I’ve been reading a few heady books recently. One of those books is Playing with Reality: How Games Shape Our World. by Kelly Clancy. The Economist has a comprehensive review of the book with a lot of details.
Playing with Reality was very interesting and I learned great deal. Initially, I had thought it was going to be about the history of games and how they had impacted thought. That is definitely in there, but there is so much more to it than that.
Ms. Clancy’s discussion of game theory as the root of all evil can be a little over the top, but not that far. People have taken the abstract, mathematical structure of game theory and applied it in ways that have been detrimental to society.
When I was in graduate school in economics, one of the things that bothered me was the over use of mathematical models that appeared to have little to do with reality. They were useful in framing up basic concepts, but the world is so much more complicated and uncertain that the utility of the models is very limited. The math was interesting but not nearly the whole story. However, we spent nearly all of our time learning the math and not the reality.
Ms. Clancy points out some of the detrimental over-uses of game theory. One of those was the wasteful and dangerous arms race foisted by the prisoner’s dilemma modeling of mutually assured destruction. We were only saved from perishing from the planet by people interceding when things just didn’t make sense.
She carries this forward to the gamification of the social media and resulting warping of society by something as abstract as “likes” as driven by the logical conclusion of game theory.
She is a little over the top on some of that, but her arguments are really well constructed and she makes you think about how some very interesting developments in pure math theory have been taken beyond their natural boundaries and polluted our culture and society.
This book went well beyond what was on the tin and was well worth the time and thought it took to absorb the arguments within. Very impressive coverage of an important topic that gets at the structure of the games that control many aspects of our politics, economics, and society.