Ahead of the game: rethinking the importance of play

Kelly Clancy’s decision to quit academia for DeepMind in London in 2019 caught university colleagues off guard. The Google-owned artificial intelligence lab had made its name by defeating two world champions of Go, the Chinese board game. But Clancy’s friends were puzzled. Why step away from biophysics experiments to join an effort with seemingly few practical applications?

“They were like: ‘What is the point of spending hundreds of millions of dollars training AI to play games?’” she recalls. “And I didn’t have a great answer to begin with. But the more I researched it, the more I realised there was this huge history of using games as a model of how we think and as simulations of the world.”

That research laid the groundwork for Playing With Reality: How Games Shape Our World, which Clancy wrote after leaving DeepMind and returning to her native US. The multi-millennium account brilliantly interweaves neuroscience, evolutionary biology, economics, business, military strategy and the origins of democracy.

At the heart of Clancy’s thesis is the idea that we’re all wired to play. Surprise, a key part of that, acts as a “learning signal”, she explains, causing the neurotransmitter dopamine to biologically encode whether our choices turned out better or worse than expected.

The brain works by “building models of the world to anticipate what’s going to happen”, Clancy says. “So, when it encounters something it doesn’t understand, that it can’t predict, that’s very compelling. Unpredictable things can be scary. But play brings unpredictability into a safe place we can explore.”

Learning and commerce

She observes that play is common across the animal kingdom, describing how experiments with rats demonstrate that those who miss out in their early months often become troubled adults. “They’re more hostile, they’re aggressive, they can’t read their peers’ social cues.”

But it’s not just about ‘playing nicely’. Great fortunes have also been built on our love of diversion, from what’s thought to be the world’s first casino in Venice in the 1600s to gaming giants such as Roblox and Nintendo today.

“A ton of CEOs’ earliest introduction to tech was building video games or games engines,” Clancy adds, naming DeepMind’s Sir Demis Hassabis, Tesla’s Elon Musk and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff as examples. Moreover, she says games still have much to teach the corporate world about putting the right incentives in place.

“The Google graveyard is infamous,” she notes. “They launch all these products and then, shortly after, cut them. The reason is Google promotes employees for starting exciting new projects but not for maintaining them. Business is like a game-design problem of how to get the behaviours you want out of the employees you have.”

A well-designed game can be remarkably long-lasting. Clancy recalls one example she encountered as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in Turkmenistan two decades ago.

“There’s a popular game the kids play there with sheep knucklebones,” she says. “I later looked it up to see how old it was – they’ve found sheep bones in the graves of children in that area from 7,000 years ago.

“[That suggests] it’s evolutionarily ancient. And evolution doesn’t keep things around unless they’re really useful.”

Chess down the ages

Chess, another game with ancient roots, crops up many times in Playing With Reality. The book cites a 13th-century friar who used it as an allegory to teach people to accept their place in society.

It tells how Freudians suggested chess satisfies the Oedipal urge to render a father figure impotent. And it describes how AI researchers treated it as a problem to be ‘solved’.

Somewhat surprisingly, Clancy has never played. “My family was a little bit blue-collar and not into that kind of thing,” she says. “I have some jealousy when people say, ‘Oh, what a beautiful move, how inspired’. Being completely illiterate at chess, I just have to believe what they’re saying.”

Clancy, instead, spent part of her youth playing computer games, including Myst. “I never got very far, but I loved puzzle games,” she says.

However, she’s critical of another popular series from her childhood. SimCity’s libertarian, small-government philosophy was baked into its design and could nudge players towards questionable choices, Clancy claims. Her book describes how one of the most successful strategies involved building a city without schools, hospitals, parks or firefighters.

“Tons of people went into urban design because of that game, and a lot of them thought it was an objective model of how cities work,” she says. “But it’s really just based on crazy equations.”

Game theory

This brings Clancy to the other motivation for her book: to warn of games’ potential for harm. Just as games can teach us to optimise our behaviours, they can also lead us astray.

“Games play us,” Clancy warns. “We think of games as harmless things or pastimes, but they’re actually extremely powerful regulators of human behaviour.”

In particular, she charts the rise of game theory in the mid-20th century and its influence on the social sciences, regulation, military strategy and business.

This branch of mathematics investigates decision-making in situations where people’s choices affect themselves and each other. The standard version assumes all the ‘players’ are rational and self-interested, seeking to predict how they will act in various scenarios.

“It’s a model of agents that are fundamentally selfish and self-interested,” says Clancy. “And that’s been rebranded by game theorists as ‘rationality’. But when we compare the predictions of game theory with the behaviours of real humans, they’re not really alike.”

Clancy argues that humans are, by nature, more social and less rule-bound, making the world more complex than game theory suggests. And she cautions that we ignore this at society’s peril.

“We play games the way the game invites us to play,” she says. “So if our systems model us as purely selfish agents, then we’ll act like selfish agents – because that’s how you win.”

But games can also be a force for good, Clancy adds, particularly in education.

“There are great examples of the gamification of genuine learning. For example, Miegakure, which helps people understand how a fourth spatial dimension would work,” she says, referring to a video game set in a world in which the computer represents each object’s position using four numbers instead of the usual three.

It’s hard to understand until you play it. And that’s the point. Just as games have shaped our history, they can continue expanding our minds as long as there are novel ideas and technologies to inspire new ways to play.

State of play

An array of innovative companies are tapping into the gaming instinct, including:

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