PLAYING WITH REALITY

A book to get the neurons firing As a passionate game player I loved reading a neuroscientist s perspective on the role games have played in humanity s attempts to navigate the game of life A dopamine hit on every page Marcus du SautoyA sweeping intellectual history of games and their importance to human progress We play games to learn about the world to understand our minds and the minds of others and to practice making predictions about the future Games are thought to be older than written language and have now become the dominant cultural media bigger than movies TV music and literature combined They are also fun But as neuroscientist and physicist Kelly Clancy argues it s time we started taking them more seriously In Playing With Reality she chronicles the riveting and hidden history of games since the Enlightenment weaving an unexpected path through military theory biology artificial intelligence neuroscience cognitive psychology and the future of democracy Games Clancy shows us have been deeply intertwined with the arc of history War games shaped the outcomes of real wars in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe Game theory warped our understanding of human behaviour and brought us to the brink of annihilation yet still underlies basi