Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World

by Kelly Clancy

The game took weeks to play. During that time, all cats had to be banished from the house to prevent them from disrupting the game pieces.

“I cannot accept that a theory of prime importance, which describes processes which everybody believes to be elementary, can be right if it is too complicated, i.e., if it describes these elementary processes as being horribly complex and sophisticated ones.”

It’s not a stretch to imagine that we might alter human dynamics by building social, political, or economic systems based on models incentivizing selfish behaviors.

We need to be aware of the ways that the games encoded in our social and technological systems warp our preferences, manufacture our desires, contaminate our attitudes toward one another, and ultimately influence our life choices.

The maximizers are already here. Any consequences too subtle to measure—environmental costs, civic discord, troubled diplomatic relations—are simply omitted from the score.