Which came first to the designers of chess: the rules or the metaphor? It feels impossible to prise the system from the story: a military battle between two monarchs, each with perfectly symmetrical assets and equally balanced capabilities. Yet there have been dozens of ‘reskins’ of chess, swapping the kings and their minions for characters from, say, Lord of the Rings, or The Simpsons, or even, bewilderingly, M&M chocolates.
Play is the primary way in which every human first tests and explores the world
Sometimes the new metaphor imbues the game with a socio-political frisson. A recent example pitches rockers – white men in leathers holding screaming guitars – against jazz musicians – black men in white suits nursing saxophones. Here chess is transformed into a mid-century fight for cultural dominance, a clash between old and new forms, with a rippling subtext of race and appropriation. Beneath the costumes, however, chess’s ancient mechanics remain unchanged, even while, to our minds, the game feels freshly pointed.
‘What is internally consistent within a game need not reflect anything about reality,’ writes Kelly Clancy, a neuro-scientist and the author of Playing with Reality, a poised and compelling history of games as an intellectual force, as well as a grave warning about their role in shaping the future. ‘Yet games have been increasingly adopted as models of the world.’ Clancy has a straightforward definition to help narrow the elastic term ‘game’: ‘A system furnished with a goal.’ For her, a carefully themed game can function as a tool to serve a dogma, rewarding players for ‘adopting its precepts’. Games are more than models of the world, she writes: ‘They’re models that reward us for believing in them.’
Games can be a particularly potent form of propaganda, not least because play is the primary way in which every human first tests and explores the world. They transcend language, too, so their messages can travel more frictionlessly than books or speeches. And they have staying power. Many have outlasted empires. History shows that games can provide a steadying sense of routine familiarity in people’s lives, offering refuge when food is scarce or war proximate, and can bind families and communities together. Games are often dismissed as trivial things and yet they often shape how we think. From Monopoly to Civilization, it is often through games that humans bring ‘the wilderness of reality into the realm of the understood’.
It’s a position shared by Tim Clare, a writer, poet, podcaster and boardgame aficionado, in his celebration of play, The Game Changers. Games ‘surround us as the ocean surrounds squid’, he writes. Ergo we take them for granted. They are played in pubs and bars, private homes, on campsites and streamed to millions of viewers on Twitch. Children and retirees play them with equal interest, as smartphone apps, or on the back pages of newspapers, or using no more than a piece of chalk on a pavement. Studies show they can ‘reduce depression and anxiety’. But their ubiquity is mainly a function of their elemental purpose: to enable us to understand society’s systems, to exercise rivalries or alliances within a figurative space, to learn how to win, lose or draw with equal grace, equipping us for the world at large.
Clare, who believes we are amid a ‘golden era of boardgames’, provides a warm, enthusiastic survey of games, which he believes, like poetry, provide us with ‘an invitation to break free of the tyranny of efficiency’. Yet, like Clancy, he too believes that play is more than time-wasting. A well-designed game can provide a persuasively critical experience of a society’s systems. He tells the story of Monopoly – the world’s bestselling trademarked boardgame (as well as the one most looked down upon by aficionados). It is a well-chosen centrepiece, a game familiar to almost everyone, with perhaps the best back-story of any boardgame, a thriller involving the question of authorship and, relatedly, remuneration.
Famously, the game’s original bald critique of capitalism was twisted into something else, a story Clare tells with compelling panache. ‘Games are politics you can touch,’ he writes, even if the winner of a game of Monopoly will regret the systems that presented them with their lonely victory. More to the point, games like this remind us that the systems around us were designed by humans, and that, as such, are neither inevitable nor indestructible: ‘We can change them.’
Clare’s book is filled with personal anecdotes and almost romantic scenes of gameplay among friends and family members. Clancy’s book is filled with first-hand experiences, too; but as a former employee at DeepMind, the Google-owned company leading efforts in artificial intelligence, there are notes of both concern and urgency to her wintrier survey. She too is most interested in games that simulate reality. Chess began as a means of teaching battlefield tactics, she explains. Then the Prussian war-games of the 18th century helped generals to refine those tactics and influence thinking, ideas still used in today’s advanced military models.
The use of games to simulate reality and forecast outcomes soon broke out of war rooms. Today, game theory is used to predict and shape responses to everything from financial markets to what we watch on Netflix, to how we might vote. Clancy, however, warns that it cannot accommodate unpredictable events, and often assume relentless capitalist self-interest on behalf of those it models: ‘Game theory is not a very good model of people. But it’s good enough to be trouble.’
Both books demonstrate, with approachable rigour, how games increasingly shape the world around us, in gamified workplaces, social media apps, political campaigning and financial markets. They often cast us in player-like roles we did not choose, but which we soon become entranced by as they ‘maximally engage our reward systems’. Games, too, are being used to train artificial intelligences, causing real-world impact.
The purpose of playing games, as human beings, is to learn about the world and how we might best survive within it; artificial intelligence, by contrast, is ‘endowed by researchers with a desire to win’. It’s a subtle change of emphasis. The games are becoming ever more consequential. By creating systems built on greedy maximising functions, Clancy believes ‘we’ve invented new monsters to slay’. This time, the enemies we face are no longer metaphorical.
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