HEFFNER: I'm Alexander Heffner, your host on the Open Mind.

I'm delighted to welcome our guest today, Kelly Clancy.

She's the author of the new book, Playing With Reality, How Games Have Shaped Our World.

Thank you so much for joining us today, Kelly.

CLANCY: Thanks so much for having me.

HEFFNER: Kelly, what motivated you to write this book?

CLANCY: Yeah, I was, uh...

I started it in the middle of COVID Lockdowns when, like a lot of people, I turned to games to pass the time, and I kind of was reacquainted with how captivating and enthralling they are.

At the same time, I was working at DeepMind, which is the AI company famous for creating programs that bested human masters in complex games, like Go and StarCraft 2.

And when I started there, it wasn't entirely clear to me why companies were spending hundreds of millions of dollars to create programs that would play games, basically.

So I started to get really interested in what are games?

Why do we play them?

Why have they been with us for thousands of years?

In fact, they're even much older than that, you know, animals play.

So why has evolution kind of conserved play and games, and what do they give to us today?

HEFFNER: And where'd you come out on that?

I know it's not a single thesis, but if you were to give the top two or three theses emerging from that research.

CLANCY: Yeah.

So I think the basic premise is that games play us.

When you play a game like Monopoly, you have to take on the sort of rules of the game.

So playing Monopoly, you have to act like a cutthroat capitalist, even if you are a total peace-loving hippie at heart, you have to stab your siblings in the back.

And games kind of incentivize certain behaviors by their roles.

And in fact, board game designers talk about when one of the first parts of designing a game is the scoring mechanism.

How do we reward certain behaviors?

How do we get the game we want by creating these scoring mechanisms.

So this is how games can kind of shape our behaviors.

And we see that they're incredibly powerful devices.

We have, I mean, for starters, it's almost impossible to stop children from playing of any species.

Mammals play lots of reptiles, fish, even insects play.

There was these old experiments in science where they removed like a big chunk, like all of the cortex, which is the part of the brain that we think of as being responsible for higher intelligence.

And that is in young rats and these rats still played.

So it's very hard to stop us from playing to stop animals from playing.

And it turns out that if you do stop them in some way, for example, you isolate young animals from their peers.

They end up being kind of, uh, growing up to be emotionally kind of unintelligent.

They don't read their social, the cues, the social cues of their peers.

They tend to mate less, they tend to be more aggressive.

And so it seems like play is this really essential part to social intelligence.

And this is true of mammals and humans.

So there's a lot of power in games.

And today they're used in a lot of our technologies.

Game design informs social media, media design, dating apps, job matching applications.

So kind of looking at these different applications is really important to understand how our behaviors are being shaped by our technologies today.

HEFFNER: Kelly, what do you mean by playing with reality as opposed to playing in reality?

CLANCY: So the more that games shape the realities we move in, the more they could sort of dictate the way that we are behaving as people.

So one of the main takeaways is that humans are very plastic.

We learn things, we change things.

We are just generally adaptable.

And this is kind of contrary to a lot of the economic models underlying a lot of modern technology.

Game theory is a branch of mathematics that was founded to serve as a kind of mathematical basis of modern economics.

And it is everywhere in our world.

The idea is that the agents in these models, in game theoretical models are totally driven by particular preferences.

So, you know, the idea is that we can kind incentivize certain behaviors through these preferences, but of course, in reality, people are adaptable.

We want to wear flip flops when it's hot, and we want to wear snow boots when it's cold.

So our preferences change.

We learn to prefer different things.

So sort of my idea is that we need to find ways of making economic models and making technological models that don't sort of assume these like fixed bundles of preferences, and instead really model true human behaviors.

By which, I mean, you know, we learn, we change, we want different things.

HEFFNER: Right.

And I asked you that question because the idea of playing with reality sounds a bit Machiavellian.

I mean, it sounds like the idea of disinformation and, and often on this program we differentiate between misinformation and disinformation, but I know necessarily did not mean that, play as in toy with.

But I do think that that is the perception of a lot of us, Luddites and not, that there is something truly devious about technologies now that are turning us into victims of really cruel games.

I say that on social media, of course, that's the cruelest of all games, too often.

But also the idea that a culture of video gaming disconnected from reality has led people down those anti-social paths.

It's the most combustible thing possible.

You have all the anti-social people who have hijacked, so-called social media.

We're where do we go from there?

CLANCY: Yeah, there's a lot there.

It's a great question.

The notion that all gamers are necessarily kind of antisocial, I think is not necessarily true.

HEFFNER: Fair enough.

CLANCY: Lots of gamers are social and a lot of gaming is social.

But this is true that there has been kind of a, there was a particularly devious act done by Steve Bannon was basically behind Gamergate, which was ...um...massive...uh... kind of nasty social media organized campaign against, for example, women in gaming.

And Steve Bannon made this realization that there were all of these gamers in the world spending a lot of time and energy playing games.

And so they had a lot of free time, a lot of maybe pent up energy, and this could be directed in certain ways.

He referred to it as kind of a monster power.

So he kind of got this army of disaffected gamers and used them against particular ideologies or particular populations within the gaming community.

This has become a standard playbook of social media campaigns, these kind of troll campaigns.

So absolutely there is some difficulty here, where it feels like gaming can be this really beautiful experience.

People learn through games, people can connect through games.

A lot of people have wonderful calming experiences through games.

And there's this community of people who are maybe isolated and have a lot of energy to spend.

And this is on one hand there's ideas that maybe we can harness this in more positive ways.

So people have created games that, for example, people can use to fold, like practice folding proteins for scientific discovery.

So a team of people playing a game called Fold It, ended up helping to discover this particular shape of a protein that was published in nature.

So there are ways of harnessing this energy, but in many instances, it is quite a negative, it can be used for negative ends, HEFFNER: Right.

And you toast to the next generation at the very outset of your book.

And I appreciate that because you're thinking about your son and how games can be constructive.

And I don't mean at all to suggest gaming has to be antisocial.

I came from Oregon Trail to Sega Dreamcast, and I'll take the very controversial position that Sega Dreamcast remains the best system of all.

I wish I could recover a couple of the sports games.

I was more of a sports gamer, as opposed to, what do you call it?

Militaristic gaming.

There's a genre name for that.

But point is how do we simulate game scenarios if not actually play real games in our public life to get better outcomes?

CLANCY: Oh, right.

There's a huge history of using games to simulate, for example, war.

So Kriegsspiel was German for war game was this technology developed in the 1800s, where German military officers would play games on these scaled maps of real battlefields and work out their attacks, their defenses.

It was incredibly effective technology and an incredible simulation technology.

They were able to simulate like battles down to like the man, the number of men lost.

They were able to kind of predict when they would need resupply or reinforcements.

So it was a really powerful technology.

And it's still used in some form, not just in militaries today, but by governmental agencies when they're planning for, for example, natural disasters or what if a big pandemic hits.

Obviously we were not prepared as a country for COVID, but these games did help people, you know, government officials start to think through these things.

My favorite example of this was a 1983 simulation game that was organized by the political scientist, Thomas Shelling, who invited 200 of the top American politicians and military officers to think through nuclear war.

And what would it look like?

The Cold War tensions were heightening at the time.

They spent like two or three weeks just thinking through, okay, if Russia hits us like this, what would we do?

What would be next?

And they realized that almost every scenario would escalate to total destruction of the globe.

And the Reagan administration turned around and opened up arms control negotiations, negotiations with the Soviets because they realized that we just didn't have the technology and we didn't have the right rhetoric, given what the power of these tools.

So games can be really powerful for kind of exploring the experiential side of life and death scenarios.

And something that's really, I think, evocative about games, or powerful about games is that they're very experiential.

When you read a novel, you talk about it in the third person, you talk about the characters as like Catherine and John.

When you play a game, you talk about, I did this, I did that.

You know, even though you're playing as Link or Mario or whatever, you say, I did these things.

I blah, blah, blah.

You talk about it in the first person.

It's a very intimate experience.

It's very kind of in your face.

And there's something important about having these experiences in this intimate way where you're playing as yourself and making choices as yourself rather than like watching other people make choices.

HEFFNER: Kelly, if you see me looking down at all, it's because I'm finding a passage that I liked in here, your book.

And it evokes this same question of could the Soviets and Americans find some shared understanding?

You write, “Having recognized this, Soviets and Americans alike worked on committed computer systems that could automatically and irrevocably retaliate, if provoked the idea, featured heavily in popular media, the 1951 Sci-fi classic, The Day the Earth Stood, still imagined an alien coalition that granted absolute power to their robotic police, who thoroughly extinguished every hint of aggression.

The technology of the time was nowhere near capable of automated decision making, but politicians adopted the fantasy as reality.” Wow.

That hits home with the advent of AI.

Reflect on that passage for us.

CLANCY: Yeah.

So the idea there is we were getting pulled into these arms races where the idea was if the Soviets hit us, we would retaliate with so much force that we would basically end Russia, and then they might hit us back, and then we would end the world.

So this was the idea behind mutually assured destruction, and it was informed by game theory, which we briefly discussed earlier.

It's ultimately an irrational strategy because what kind of American president would, what human would press a button knowing that it would basically end the world.

And so these two superpowers were left with two options.

Either they had to have a madman in charge, which Nixon tried to pretend that he was a madman and was so sort of amoral that he would be willing to end the world if provoked or have an automated system that could automatically detect incoming missiles and retaliate if needed.

So both Americans and the Soviets were trying to work on these automated systems.

They never really worked.

They still wouldn't work today.

We just don't have the technology.

We certainly if we can barely have self-driving cars, we definitely don't want automated nuclear missile launchers.

So it is this idea that we can have some kind of synthetic rationality, some kind of synthetic decision making.

And ultimately, that was kind of what game theory was intended because because...it came out at around World War II, which is also when nuclear weapons came to the fore, and suddenly war was being waged on a much faster timescale than before war.

War could unfold in a matter of minutes with missiles and airplanes.

Whereas it took weeks to unfold with like land troops before.

So the military was looking for some way of making decisions in a much faster, kind of like non-emotional way.

So game theory was promised to be this science of decision making, because games are all about, if you move here, what do I do next?

So it's a kind of mathematical treatment of that problem.

But unfortunately it ended up in these kind of strange places like where we were stockpiling lots of missiles, but ultimately, successful in keeping peace.

At least we didn't have a particular war.

HEFFNER: Right.

And I think we all read social media now feeling like it's kind of the mines are dropping on our brains, while we averted planetary crisis and annihilation, it does not feel like we retained the more promising quality of games.

There's a lot of gamesmanship.

But when you talk about in the book, some of the positive recollections of people's experiences with games, the result being human and technological innovation, I see us being in this inevitable destructive game now in our social and political system.

I know it's not an easy question.

It's like the hardest question that a lot of people are asked these days.

But what do you do about it?

If you see models the way people are having discourse, maybe you wouldn't accept the premise that it's a game, but the idea of, when we used to call it Twitter and sub-tweeting someone and saying, you don't know what you're talking about, the game that is partisan warfare right now is killing our country.

I'm just wondering if there are any examples, not from history, because you take care of that in your book, and I encourage people to pick this up.

But going on right now, contemporaneously to our conversation games that are helping society, um...you know...and if we... if there are ways to channel it, obviously in a lab at major universities right now, as you described, there are people doing experiments that we could call games to try to cure new diseases.

But I'm really talking about the humane, the idea of games revitalizing our humanity and just doing games with mice in a lab is not going speak to the broader problem here.

CLANCY: Yeah, there's a really interesting sort of dichotomy within games where, on one hand we think of play as being this beautiful expression of creativity and invention, and it's this wellspring of scientific discovery.

And then there's also this aspect of games where they're rule bound and controlling and cutthroat and zero sum.

And one kind of framing that I really like about games is that even if we're in a competitive game like chess, the players are still cooperating.

They're still playing together.

They're still both trying to have a good time.

The philosopher of games, Thi Nguyen says, games are a technology for cooperation.

And so trying to look back at that framework, I think helps me in that always realizing that even though we are fighting with each other in this country, for example, we are all trying to do the right thing.

We all have values that we're trying to uphold, and to really recognize that there are values that we maybe sometimes share, and at least that we can recognize that these are values driven conflicts.

In terms of if there are games that I see as sort of positive sum, I think there are within gaming itself there are certainly lots of really cool community games, where know, um, people are participating in their local neighborhoods, games that people are using to improve their own health or improve certain aspects of their own lives are trying to better so like gamification of your health, your productivity, you're learning languages and stuff.

I mean educational games I think are by far the most promising field for sort of gamifying reality.

But in terms of social media, I think it's almost inherently problematic so far as long as we're kind of scoring these systems by how much attention it's extracting from people, it's always going to be kind of negative sum, it's always going to be harmful in some ways because it's these things are like literally hijacking our attention and it was kind of racketing up our anxiety and stuff.

There's a game, there's a movie from the eighties, War Games, where a computer is like working out all of these ways of simulating a nuclear war.

And in the end, it decides that the only way to win is not to play.

And so for some of these things, I think the best thing we can do is actually disconnect from these technologies.

Say, it's not on us to save it.

We we're not going to make it better.

Let's actually have conversations with humans I've had a quite a few people come up to me worried about like, I play too many games, or I'm on technology too much.

And I would say what do I do?

And I would say, well, what is the game giving to you?

What is it you're getting out of that?

You know, with social media, maybe it's connection.

For some people these little like phone games, maybe it's like having some sense- HEFFNER: Connection.

Connection and relevancy.

There's the perception that you're only relevant now if you're on social media.

CLANCY: That's a really good point.

And it's really hard to disconnect.

I mean, especially if, you know, you have a community there.

Um...it's...and you know There's all these new ones now, these new social networks, so it's really hard to reestablish community.

But the best thing I can say is you can always establish community in your neighborhood.

HEFFNER: Last question.

It seems to me, if we're going to extrapolate this, your thesis and book to improve our national political situation, that we would want to create public policy through games where you win one, you lose one.

Everyone is always guaranteed some merit in the process of the game, but also not one person is going to dominate and monopolize.

And that's why people don't like playing games when they constantly lose.

They just don't.

They hate it.

I'm like that with crossword puzzles and Scrabble, I can't even remember the name of it, right?

Other games like pick-up basketball and tackle football in the snow, I'm happy with.

There's something also redeeming about those things to me, like tackling someone in the snow or pulling the flag and flag football that is not redeeming what I'm playing Scrabble.

So take us through that.

How can we create games that have some baseline of merit, but at the same time offer a reality in which, you will win one, even if it goes around 10 times and it's not until the 10th try that you win.

CLANCY: Yeah, this I think one of the more exciting applications for games it's known as reverse game theory or mechanism design, which is basically you're using aspects of game design to design certain systems where certain behaviors are incentivized for players.

So for example, one of my favorite examples of this is kidney organ and organ donation market.

So when organ donation became a kind of real technology in the nineties, some very shady character tried to set up this like organ market where he would like, an organ brokerage basically, where he would like find poor people who wanted to donate their organs for money and then like connect them with people who needed organs.

Pretty immediately American Congress banned this, you know, sale of organs for money.

So we had to find a new way of kind of making, connecting people who needed organs, with people who were willing to donate organs.

And so these mathematicians figured out that, you know, lots of people's relatives are willing to donate organs to them, but often they're not a match.

But what they did was find ways of, if maybe you're not a match for your partner, but you're a match for somebody else's partner, and that person is also willing to donate their kidney to them, so you kind of swap kidneys.

And sometimes found these ways of like daisy chaining these swaps for like 70 people long.

So we can use these tools from game design to incentivize a market, not based on money, but markets based on love, based on caring, fairness, HEFFNER: Fairness, and reciprocity.

We're about out of time.

We always get to the best question last.

We'll have to have you back.

Kelly Clancy, her book is Playing with Reality and playing in reality too.

Thank you for your time today.

CLANCY: Thank you so much.

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