Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World

Kelly Clancy. Riverhead, $30 (368p) ISBN 978-0-593-53818-0

Neuroscientist Clancy debuts with a sweeping investigation of the roles games have played in human history. Examining why humans are drawn to games, Clancy contends that the process of mastering them by learning rules and the possible outcomes of various moves satisfies humanity’s evolutionary drive to understand cause-and-effect relationships. Tracing the influence of games from the earliest known dice (found in a 7,000-yearold Iranian settlement) through SimCity, Clancy notes that probability theory grew out of Italian Renaissance mathematician Gerolamo Cardano’s and early modern French scholar Blaise Pascal’s writings about dice. Elsewhere, she suggests that Kaiser Wilhelm owed his battlefield success to playing Kriegsspiel (a chesslike war game with scoring based on the historical efficacy of various military tactics) as a child, and describes how chess has been used by AI researchers to measure the intelligence of software. The history fascinates, and Clancy’s sophisticated analysis highlights the dangers of overgeneralizing from games to reality. For instance, she argues that game theory, which stemmed from Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann’s early 20th-century musings about strategy in two-player zero-sum games, has been misapplied to real-life situations by economists who fail to recognize that the premises of von Neumann’s hypothetical game (players have fixed goals and “all value can be objectively measured”) don’t transfer neatly to the real world. Readers won’t want to put this down. Agent: Will Francis, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (June)

technical fixes. These include the installation of sensors to notify arborists when the soil around trees in a park in Maastricht, Netherlands, has dried out, in order to halt a mass die-off; the use of LiDAR (light detection and ranging) sensors mounted on vehicles to monitor the health of trees in New York City and Singapore by collecting hard-to-record data, such as tree canopy size; and the deployment of AI-directed drones that spray flame-retardant chemicals to fight wildfires in cities in Southern California. Galle’s finely detailed microhistories of city employees attempting to find more efficient and effective ways to do their jobs fascinate. But as the stories reach their climactic moment of technological innovation, they start to sound more like promotional material (“DIOPSIS will give local authorities the information they need to prove the incredible value of targeted investments and maximize cities’ outcomes”). While the narrative is instructive on a granular level, its boosterish tone feels at odds with the dire situations under discussion, in which

excessive monitoring is necessary merely to mitigate worsening conditions. This disappoints. (June)