Factually! with Adam Conover - Your Brain is Hardwired to Love Games with Kelly Clancy

Episode Date: June 19, 2024

Games often get a bad rap as mere distractions, the frivolous filler between so-called "important things." But research into the connection between people and games reveals that they’re not just beneficial—they're essential. This week, Adam is joined by bioscientist and neurophysicist Kelly Clancy, author of Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World, to explore the pivotal role games play in our development, history, and even in the natural world beyond humans. Find Kelly's book at factuallypod.com/booksSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually, I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. This week we're talking about one of my favorite topics, games. I am a gamer, I love games of all types, but especially I love video games. I grew up obsessed with them.

And like with so many adolescent romances, my parents did not approve. They thought that Super Nintendo was gonna lead me to ruin, okay? And when the Nintendo 64 came out, I was forced to borrow money from a friend and pay him back over months just to get these games that my parents were certain would harm me and rot my brain. And you know, today, as an adult, I'm happy to report that my parents were wrong and I was right. Suck it, Mom! I know you listen to the show, okay?

Because now we know without a doubt that games actually are important. You know, a couple years ago we had on the show the philosopher C.T. Nguyen, and he explained compellingly that games are their own art form, an art form that deals specifically with agency. Like imagine three different games. In one, you're a general commanding troops, in another you're a knight on a magic quest, and in a third you're a rich guy with a sick obsession for building the craziest rollercoaster's imaginable

consequences be damned. That is a real game. In each of these games, you're acting out a different role. Each game has a different idea of how agency in a specific sphere works and what it means. That makes games distinct as an art form from films or novels or other art forms, because it is the only one that contains the agency of the person experiencing the artwork as something to be played with. And that makes games valuable as an art form.

They are not trivial. They contain information about us. They encode our values and our preconceptions. And that's why we have been playing them as a species since the dawn of humanity. So what kind of roles have games played in human history and what do they tell us about people and society today? Well, we are going to get into all of that on today's episode,

but before we do, I just wanna remind you that if you wanna support this show and all the conversations we bring you, you can do so on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad free and you can join our awesome online community, which is full of people who love talking about games

and other interesting things. And of course, if you wanna to come see me do stand up on the road, head to adamconover.net for my tickets and tour dates. Coming up soon, I'm headed to Phoenix, Arizona, Toronto, Canada, a bunch of other dates are going to hit my calendar very soon. So check that out at adamconover.net.

Now to talk about games and our evolving relationship to them, our guest today is Kelly Clancy. She is a bioscientist and a neurophysicist, as well as a journalist. And her fascinating new book is called Playing with Reality, How Games Have Shaped Our World. Please welcome Kelly Clancy. Kelly, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Thanks so much for having me. So let's talk about games, my favorite topic. How basic are games to humanity as a human activity? It turns out they go back real far. Actually, beyond humans, they're evolutionarily ancient. Like insects play, fish play, pretty much all mammals play. Wait, tell me more about how insects play. I'm really sorry to jump in right away, but you said that and I's like, you know, it's kind of very simple stuff. And the same is true of animals. It's all very simple play,

like playing with, like fish will play with bubbles, they'll kind of ride bubbles. Wow. Birds will sled. So yeah, a lot of animals play and it's very correlated with intelligence. More intelligent animals tend to play more and humans play a lot.

And it's one of these behaviors that neuroscientists have had trouble studying because it's so fundamental that you can't really stop animals from doing it. You can suck the entire cortex off of a rat and it lives, it's fine. You can do this when it's a baby and it has a pretty normal life.

But it doesn't have a cortex, which is like the part of our brain we think of as being responsible for higher intelligence, and it will still play games. So it's just very fundamental part of our brain circuitry and hard to study for that reason. Play is literally hardwired into our brains to some degree. The urge to play.

That's right. The closest we've got to kind of abolishing that behavior is, it turns out rats have a kind of laughter, like a play vocalization, and they'll make this vocalization when they want to play and when they laugh or whatever, the other rats in their area stop whatever they're doing and they all play together. But if a rat is born deaf, it can't hear those vocalizations so it ends up playing much less than it's hearing peers. Oh. And yeah, and so it has a kind of-

This is breaking my heart. Well, it's unfortunate, but it is nature. And yeah, so those rats grow up to be kind of socially awkward. They can't read their social peers' cues. They are pretty aggressive. So we think that play has this really important role in sort of socializing us. Yeah, I just think it's so funny that you said

the closest we've gotten to abolishing play, like that there are scientists out there who are going like, I am studying how to abolish play. It's too much fun. You must stamp it out. Like it's just, I'm sorry to do a German accent. It just seems like a very, like what a horrible thing to want to study. It's too much fun. You must stamp it out. Like it's just, I'm sorry to do a German accent. It just seems like a very,

like what a horrible thing to want to study. That's true. That I had not thought of it that way. And now I feel terrible. Luckily I'm not doing this experiment. Well, hopefully, you know, these, I can imagine, like I would want to be the scientist who like figures out a new way to help the deaf rats play, right?

I would think yeah, like let's come up with some nice games for the deaf rats that help them communicate In in Germans defense, this was a German team that it really was a German team. Oh my god There's a German team currently working on Rat tickling so they tickle rats and they they teach rats hide and seek rat tickling, so they tickle rats, and they teach rats hide and seek. They teach rats hide and seek? Yeah, and like, bait, like kids, like human kids cannot play hide and seek

until they're three or four, I think. So rats are actually pretty smart to be able to play that game. But yes, there's a German lab teaching rats to hide and seek. I was too mean to the Germans then, because that is such a wholesome, fun group of Germans. We're like, yes, we're gonnaell Teacher has to play hide and seek.

And the government pays me to do this. It's very nice in our country. Yeah. Man, so let's define play first of all, because we're talking about play. Like if animals do it, it must be a very distinct sort of behavior. So what do we mean when we say play?

And then from there, let's get to games themselves. Yeah, so play we could define as, it's usually kind of like a behavior undertaken of an animal's free will, it doesn't need to do it. It appears to have some kind of enjoyment in it. And it's often social in nature, but it could also be with like an object. So they're like exploring a ball or exploring some, you know, jacks in their environment or something. And then

a game is, you could think of as, it's kind of like, I would say, you know, animals play and humans play games, like games a little more sophisticated. It's like a system that's furnished with a goal that players can only accomplish by certain means. So for example, like golf, you need to get a ball in a hole and you can't just like pick up the ball and walk it over to the hole and plop it in. You have to get the ball in the hole by hitting it with a funny stick and following all these particular rules. Yeah, there's, there's restrictions. Like in soccer, the main restriction is you can't use your hands.

If you could use your hands, it wouldn't be the same game or maybe even close to a game at all. That's right. And what is the, I can understand sort of the social purpose of play generally as a way, I don't know, to get out aggression in a safe manner, to create social bonds, to rehearse other activities that you might wanna do, that sort of thing.

I mean, maybe those are my naive assumptions and you have better ones, but that seems pretty obvious. What is the purpose of a game socially? And what are the oldest games we know about? Yeah, so the purpose of a game, in the same way that play has lots of reasons, there's multiple reasons for a game. And they're kind of a way that we explore uncertainty

and explore things we don't understand in the world. So that can be through the realm of like probabilistic games like dice. So we're kind of exploring randomness in that. It could be exploring other people's minds in a game like poker, where we have hidden information and we're trying to work out how somebody with information we don't have makes decisions.

It can be other kinds of uncertainty. It's generally, I think, teaching us, it's kind of practice for like, what do we do when we don't know what to do? And that's also true of play. Like, a lot of play for animals is like they're wrestling, they're training up for like, how do I hunt when I'm older? Or how do I wrestle like potential rivals

for mates when I'm older? So a lot of it is kind of practice for, and practice in a safe space for future events. And some of our oldest games, I think like potentially the oldest game boards that archeologists have found are like up to 10,000 years old, like Mancala boards. So like it's like a pebble counting kind of race game.

I played Mancala. Yeah. It's a, it's, I remember in my middle school, I think like one of the teachers had a Mancala set and taught us all how to play it. And like, it was one of those games that kids would, you know, during lunch hour, sit around and play Moncala. Yeah, where you drop, you like drop a stone

in each little dish and try to make your way around. I forget the exact rules. It was something like that, right? Yeah, so there's like, it seems like a lot of the older games are like kind of racing or, yeah, moving pebbles around games. So like Senate is another really old one that was from ancient Egypt and it was like a racing game

and also people were using it to kind of teach players how to navigate the afterlife. So they kind of like put these instructions on top of the board game squares for like how to get past the mummification chamber. And so it was kind of like this democratization of the afterlife. That's cool.

But I have to imagine that, first of all, 10,000 years is a long time in human civilization. That's like really getting early. So this means that like games have been present for like all of human history that we know of. Is that right? Yeah, I mean, recorded history, yeah, I would say yes. It's really hard to tell what exactly constitute a game piece

and a lot of archaeological digs, because something that looks like a game piece could be something else. There's, for example, there's a game that's played a lot today in Central Asia, which is played with the knuckle bones of sheep. And it looks like there's evidence of people playing that game for like thousands of years,

but it could also be that people have been eating sheep knuckle bones for a long time. So it can be really hard to distinguish. Yeah. Oh man, these people really love this game. They have like a lot of knuckle bones. Yeah, right. They're just fucking hungry for sheep.

Yeah. What is the game that you play with sheep knuckle bones? I'm curious. I think it's kind of like more or less like a Jax game or like some kind of dice game. I've never played it myself, but if they use it like it's as though it's a dice. Actually so did like the ancient Greeks.

A lot of cultures use this knuckle bones. I'm just imagining going on like the board game geek website and getting into arguments on forums about like what the best brand of sheep knuckle bones is to play your sheep knuckle bone game. I'm very curious, I'd love to, if anybody listening has played the sheep knuckle bone game, please let us know in the comments.

But I also have to imagine that there might've been games like before any of those discovered game boards because like, you know, what about like sport type games? I mean, just in terms of, I mean, I imagine games developing from just being like, hey, who can hit the rock with the pebble? You know, just that sort of simple competition, add a ruler to and you have a game, right?

Totally. And yeah, it seems like sports is something that is for the most part not gonna be in the archeological record, but some are like, there's some amazing amazing like the Mesoamerican ball game, which was like a family of games in Mesoamerica where they were like trying to keep this hard huge rubber ball off the ground using their hips. So kind of like racquetball except without without racquets. And it was used as a proxy for war. So like all of the portraits of like kings from that era,

this is like three, almost 4,000 years ago, all the kings are like wearing headgear because that's how they like became legitimate was like through this game. And then if they had any territorial disputes, instead of having a war, they would play the game, which is actually kind of brilliant. And this was also true of like,

I believe like the Iroquois, like the six nations were often playing lacrosse instead of having wars. And that's how they kind of cohered as a collective tribe. So there's really interesting history to sports as well. Yeah, so these are games or sports that came out of ritualized warfare. Like my understanding of ritualized warfare would be like,

if you have two groups of people near each other and they need to settle disputes, but they don't really wanna kill each other, like, oh, too many people have died. Let's just have like a fake little war to determine no death or maybe little death, but you know, but I could see how that could become a game where like, hey, instead of brandishing spears,

what if we brandage a basketball, right? Or whatever. Yeah, yeah. And it's great. And you know, it's something that you see in the animal kingdom as well. Like for example, deer, people didn't know what antlers were for the longest time.

Cause people were like, well, why don't deer just have really sharp antlers and kill each other when like they wrestle? That would be way cooler. And then they could stab their predators and like, why aren't deer antlers sharp? And it turns out it's because if they killed each other all the time, there wouldn't be any deer.

So the wrestling with their antlers for mates is like a much more like sensible way of having this kind of like limited war. Yeah. And that explains like East coast sports rivalries. Right? Because like people from like New York and Boston and Philly, they hate each other. But hey, way better to, you know, have them just scream at the Celtics and the Knicks and the Red Sox and the Phillies than actually, you know, come to blows. That makes a lot of sense.

Now, I think what we should do is we should turn into ritualized warfare. And when one of those teams wins, their state enlarges and the other state shrinks. Let's have the, you know, MLB, let's have the World Series be for territory, you know? Oh, I like that a lot. Yeah. They need to bring that back. But we have this idea that games are trivial, right?

That's what I grew up with throughout most of my life. My parents, you know, I was very interested in games and they were like, what are you doing with those things? You know, I remember telling them, oh, I'd like to be a game designer. And they were like, that's not even a job, you know? And that's, I don't blame them for that. And it's not a field I actually think

I would have been good at, but it was, you know, it was something I was interested in and it was seen as something very trivial, not something that was worth being interested in. And so we could be having a conversation about what are the source of games, you know, where do games come from, even if it was just a trivial fun activity. But you make the argument that games are important,

an important part of human society and civilization. Why is that? Yeah. So part of why I was kind of inspired to read this book was like, I was just wondering, people have been so fascinated by games for so many thousands of years. Surely there's something interesting there. Like, why have we been playing them for so long? Why do animals play them? And there's also all this really interesting links to like, you know, more intelligent animals play more brain like animals with larger, larger brains play more. There's this really interesting link between intelligence and games. And this is also coming true

in the search for like artificial intelligence where for 75 years, actually longer, computer scientists have been using games as the kind of substrate to grow an artificial intelligence. So like we had Deep Blue playing chess, to grow an artificial intelligence. So like we had Deep Blue playing chess, we had AlphaGo playing Go. So games are this really interesting model of like how we make decisions.

So yeah, so this has been a really deep part of human history. And I think contemplating games has actually been extremely beneficial to science as well. For a long time, people were obsessed with games for thousands of years. There's like a three, 4,000 year old Hindu scripture that compares dice to a drug. In the Renaissance, the casino was born and the Venetian nobility almost crumbled because they all went bankrupt playing games.

It has this huge hold on us. Around the Renaissance, because casinos were born and now there's this huge monetary incentive to understand randomness better, scientists were incentivized to look into this and probability theory came out of Pascal, Blaise Pascal and Pierre Fermat looking at the mathematics of dice. And this was like extremely revolutionary because at the time people thought chance was like reflecting the whim of gods. Like people would, clergy would like throw dice in ancient Greece to augur the will of God. And actually the word clergy comes from Kleros, the Greek for chance. So there was this really deep belief that like chance is just like this unknowable thing

until the Renaissance and people started like doing the math and doing the experiments and being like, huh, I get, you know, if I roll a six side of die, I get one a six of the time or whatever. And realizing that actually there's like laws of chance and there's like order that you can ascertain. And so this was like a huge, huge win for the scientific method because it was like suddenly like, like the mind of God was noble in some way. And then probability theory kind of laid the groundwork for better empiricism. Um, it like, it's a basis for all of economics, uh, like expected value. We talk about like, you know, the stock market being bets, like all, like so much of our language is really comes from thinking about the world as though we're all playing a game and like making decisions and like calculating our risks

as though making decisions in a game. Yeah. And one of the cool things about what you're describing is, you know, you're talking about thinkers and scholars looking at dice and saying, Oh, okay, let's hold on and we can deduce probability from these, but they are sort of figuring out something that I bet the dice player is already new. Like if you're, if you're throwing dice and wagering money on it and doing that a lot and maybe making your living at it,

you might not think that the roll the dice is the subject of the whim of God. You're like, no, if I make this bet, I have a pretty good chance of coming out ahead. Like there is a knowledge that those players would receive about the world from the game that the great thinkers of the time were yet to figure out. Yeah. And they basically just kind of externalized it. Because I think, again, at that time, it was

also thought that games are really trivial. And then Pascal was a child prodigy and his family converted to this like weird Christian sect and he wasn't allowed to think about mathematics because it was akin to mental masturbation. And then at some point his dad died and he had this dissolute period and played a lot of dice games and started thinking about these questions. Yeah, so it was really that firsthand knowledge that got him thinking about these things.

And from his insights, we got this extremely profound field of mathematics. And all of these other thinkers were like, okay, yeah, games are actually huge. Like Gottfried Liebniz, the philosopher was like, okay, I'm gonna found a games academy because games are way more profound than we realized. That is really cool.

I also know that, you know, while we're staying on the topic of mathematics, when I was in college, I took a class on game theory, while we're staying on the topic of mathematics, when I was in college, I took a class on game theory, which is a very important like branch of mathematics that is explicitly tied to games and studies things that are called games. And I know have, you know, had a wide application in the military, things like that.

Tell me about that branch of mathematics. Yeah, so game theory came largely out of the brain of the genius John von Neumann, who was a Hungarian physicist, mathematician, who fled Europe in the 30s because he was Jewish and was not welcome there anymore, and was unbelievably and completely rightfully devastated by what was happening in Europe. And he really wanted to understand why humans behave the way they do. Like why would we make such irrational decisions?

Or like, why do we, yeah, he wanted to kind of just understand human behavior. So he thought of it as a game, like playing a two player game where like only one person can win and we're all making decisions where we're trying to like maximize our chance of winning. And so he had some nifty mathematics and came up with game theory in part, in help with Oscar Morgenstern. It's supposed to be a model of humans.

And so the game theoretic agent, this like model of a human is supposed to be purely selfish. And it's like just trying to win the game. And so they thought this was a pretty good model of humans. And so the game theoretic agent, this like model of a human is supposed to be purely selfish and it's like just trying to win the game. And so they thought this was a pretty good model of humans. And then this was co-opted by the military because, you know, with World War Two happening, we got the nuclear bomb and suddenly we had to make decisions on a much faster time scale at like a much more existential level. So like diplomacy was being kind of outstripped by our technical, you know, development. So people thought that like game theory would be this way that we could kind of make decisions better. And so the RAND Corporation research and development think tank basically took game theory as this model for war and it gave us things like mad, mutually assured destruction. So like, if we have two superpowers that have like

a lot of nuclear weapons, they shouldn't strike each other because if one strikes the other country then the other country will completely annihilate the first. So you get this kind of like uneasy piece. So a lot of these like interesting thought experiments came out of game theory. But ultimately, it's actually a terrible model of humans. Because when psychologists looked at whether humans are well described by game theoretical agents, we don't really act like that at all. We're not selfish. We're pretty honest, actually. So there's a lot of, and now kind of game theory has been, it's kind of the central foundation of a lot of economics. So it's somewhat problematic, I'd say.

Yeah, well, I mean, all of that is so fascinating. It makes me have so many thoughts because first of all, like game theory also in a way seems to be an attempt to reduce politics or the human social decision-making to numbers. And it kind of works that way in some cases. For instance, I was involved in the writer's strike last year and there's a lot of like,

okay, if we do X, they'll do Y when you're talking about conflict you know, conflict negotiations, there's a whole lot of thinking that way. And you really need to know what the other person is gonna do. But that also requires knowing who they are, what their sources of information are, you know, what their personality is,

what the political pressures are on them, how they might be feeling that day, you know, whether they're hangry at the meeting, all those things are real and you can't reduce them out. And yet there is a little bit of truth in the game theory. And it reminds me of when I play a video game about politics, you know, there's some wonderful ones I've played,

Crusader Kings is a wonderful game about medieval politics, or there's lots of games in this category where you're sort of doing diplomacy. And when the game models it correctly, you actually do learn something about how diplomacy works. You're like, oh, okay, this real issue is faced by rulers, actually in the real world. And now I understand I have a little bit of insight.

Maybe I can take that to my own time. I have to be diplomatic with my boss at work or whatever. But it's a mistake to think that that reduced game model is literally a model for reality. It's more of a, it's a model, right? It's a smaller version of it. So it's like right in one way, but wrong in another. Does that make sense?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and there are right things about game theory as well. But to kind of like over rely on it for all of our models of humanity is certainly not warranted. But it is certainly an area in which like games themselves had a huge impact on the world. That literally thinking that came out of games, Capital G games, like are influencing American policy

thermonuclear war. That's like a really big fucking effect that for games to have. Right. So, you know, and the kind of scary thing about MAD, for example, is it's not actually that rational. Like if you were to get hit, if like one country was got hit by another country's nuclear war, and then their response is like,

okay, I'm gonna now end the entire world. Like that's not rational. So they realized pretty early on that like, either they would have to have an automatic, like an automated system to make that kind of decision. So like we get hit and then it just like ends the world. And that's what like Dr. Strangelove is all about. Or you have to have a like crazy person

in charge of the nuclear arsenal, which Nixon was basically trying to be. Like he said, you know, he called it mad man theory and he was trying to be as crazy as possible to sort of back up the threat that like, yes, I would end the world if you hit us. And that's actually partly what Vietnam War was all about. It was supposed to like show that we were kind of like

morally depraved as a country and that we would just do whatever to like, yeah. So the Vietnam war was in many ways like a kind of ploy to back up the credibility of our nuclear threat. So there's some like really dark things that come out of subscribing to these, you know, to these ideas that I think ultimately like just plain old diplomacy did a lot better on. And then, you know, in the defense of games, this is not game theory, but then in 1983,

we were having heightened tensions in the Cold War. And Thomas Schelling, an economist, was invited to organize a game for, like a simulation game of nuclear war for top 200 American politicians and military officers. They all workshopped through a bunch of different nuclear war scenarios, like what if the Soviets hit us here? What if this happened? What if it was a limited nuclear war?

Blah, blah, blah. They went through what technological capabilities do we actually have? What do they have? Yada, yada, yada. And like pretty much every outcome of every war they could work through was like the end of the world. The best case scenario was, I think 500,000,

500 million people died and then another 500 million people would die of radiation poisoning. So all of the like officials, all the politicians, all the military officers were so horrified by this game outcome that they realized, like, oh shit, we can't actually do the things we think we can do. This would all be a disaster.

And it actually inspired the Reagan administration to totally tone down their nuclear rhetoric and open up sweeping arms negotiations with the Soviets. So in that case, the game was pretty great. This was the real-life version of the war games film, uh, where the, the computer plays tic, tac, toe a million times and says the only way to win is not to play. So embarrassingly enough, Reagan also loved that movie and that movie also scared the shit out of him. Yeah, he was like obsessed with it. He had it like played for his whatever camp, camp David or something.

And, uh, that plus the outcome of this game, scare the shit out of him. And then they like turned around. So yes, that, that movie Ronald Reagan. Oh my God. I mean, Ronald Reagan, such a harmful destructive president in American history, in my opinion, as I've done a lot of work about, now I'm just thinking about what are the other movies and video games that I could have had Ronald Reagan play to improve America so that he didn't, you know, uh, cut, you know, cut a million

departments disastrously and, you know, uh, usher in an age of, you know, jingoism and hyper-capitalism. You know, maybe we could have had him pay, play, I don't know, Papers, Please. And what other games that like build empathy in people? What movies could he have been watching? You know, very funny to think about. Thank you to Claretin for supporting this episode

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ThriveMarket.com slash Factually. As long as we're talking about functional games, I have a question about the whole premise of functional games in a little bit, but is this something that people are still using today? The idea of, hey, let's create a game that is gonna convince someone of something or teach someone something in the real world. Are there any prominent examples of that?

Yeah, so there's tons of military, the military uses games all the time for training and for planning. Yeah, so Kriegspiel came out of like 19th century Germany and was like hugely successful, helped Germany secure an empire, helped Hitler in the early days of like his successful campaign and then hurt him later

when he fucked up planning to invade the Soviets. So there- What was the Kriegspiel? Like what was these games? What were they? Yeah, so Kriegspiel came out of chess. So chess was originally came out of like sixth century India.

It was intended to be an abstraction of war. And a lot of people used it as a training for like military strategic thinking. And in the late 1700s, a mathematician, Johann Helwig, was like, actually, chess could be even better if it was a little more realistic, if it was less abstract. So he started kind of layering realism back in. He expanded the chessboard to like 1600 squares and other people started improving on that. So soon it was like played on scaled maps of real territories and people were kind of like-

This guy sounds like a nerd. He sounds like a real Warhammer guy, like in his basement, like painting his mini-figs. It's exactly, and that's where Warhammer came out of it. He's like, you know what would make chess better would be if there was like a rifle guy and like, you know, a goblin on a cart and maybe we have a dragon in there

and like it could be really big. I know that guy. I went to high school with that guy and he's still doing that today, except now he's in his forties. And you know what, good for him. I wish I was playing, but sorry, go on. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, that's literally where that came from. So yeah, it got improved over time. Those war games today, those war games, they literally came out of that sort of a gameplay like a century or two ago. That's right, yeah. That's cool. Yeah, so it became really, really useful. So like two teams of like military officers would fight,

would kind of like take turns on this little scaled map with their little like lead block troops attacking each other or invading each other or spying on each other or whatever. And they were like, they would have these like data tables from real wars of like, okay, if a cannon hits here, how much, like how many casualties do we expect? And so they could like really, really realistically simulate like how many troops do we need?

When would they need to be resupplied? So it was like incredibly powerful simulation engine and really powerful for planning attacks because people could kind of like zoom out and get a bird's eye view of like, what would this battle look like? So it was hugely successful. And yeah, and then it eventually kind of became commercialized and turned into

things like Warhammer and Dungeons and Dragons. And so yeah, instead of like, you know, troops, you have like your character and instead of like the umpire deciding casualties, it's like the dungeon master. That's, I mean, I played those games as kids. And by the way, I was, I was teasing war gamers a little bit, but war gaming is a very, very wonderful hobby that I wish I had the attention span for to calculate all those tables.

But it never occurred to me that that literally came from like people working for the military going, okay, a cannon would kill this many real people. That it's a little bit chilling almost that a, from like people working for the military going, okay, a cannon would kill this many real people. That's a little bit chilling almost that a game used to actually simulate real deaths by people who would then go send those people into battle. Like now we play for fun.

It's a little bit eerie. Yeah, so H.G. Wells is one of the people who like popularized it. He like played Kriegenspiel. He thought it was cool. And so then he made it into like this tabletop home version where you have the little like soldier troops and he called it little wars. So, and he was a huge pacifist and he was,

in the book he keeps kind of like trying to clear his conscience and say, I'm hoping that by playing at war, people won't want to wage it. Because also at the time, democracy was kind of becoming a thing. And everyone was kind of freaking out in Europe and thinking, well, what if people just vote for war?

Like who's gonna make good decisions? So he was, Wells was kind of trying to educate people and give them like a firsthand account of like what war looks like. And obviously that hasn't like really borne out. Like Winston Churchill played little wars and lots of people play war games and then end up like getting recruited by the military.

So I cut you off a little while ago to tell us about Kriegerspiel. That's fascinating. And then what you said, it helped Hitler, then it hurt him. So good, I guess. But what happened after that in terms of the development of war games as something the military uses? Yeah. So, you know, the military still does these kind of exercises all the time, both for training and for planning purposes. They've made video games. the US Army's made video games of like trying to be as realistic as possible.

And it's actually been their like number one recruiting tool for getting young kids interested in enlisting. So yeah. Like, oh wow, I died in the video game. So this would be fun to die in real life this way. I would enjoy that. That's the idea? I guess, yeah. Oh, bummer.

I mean, are there more positive examples of games being used to change people's minds about things or et cetera? Yeah, well, so, you know, it's not just the military using these games, lots of like, lots of non-military like government departments use these things.

So the year before Hurricane Katrina happened, I think FEMA had a big simulated game called Hurricane Pam where they're like preparing for a giant hurricane hitting New Orleans. Obviously, whatever they learned from that game, they did not put into practice in time for Hurrica Contrita. But people go through these exercises and sometimes it's more successful than other times.

And then in terms of like, I think there's a lot of games coming out by commercial developers that are intended to develop empathy. So like this war of mine, I don't know if you played that, but it's like, I think it's taking place in maybe Sarajevo, like during a siege. And you play, it's like a survival game and you're playing as, you know, people in a shelled out house trying to survive the winter. So people, you know, games are really powerful for giving people a sort of firsthand experience

of whatever, you know. And I think that's something, I mean, that's just like such a powerful thing about games because, you know, when you think about a game versus like a reading a book, when you read a book, you, you know, you talk about the character, you say like, Caroline did this thing and then she did this other thing.

You're just kind of like reading what's happening versus when you're playing a video game, when you're describing what's happening in the game to a friend, you say, I did this in the video game. You don't say like the character did this. Like you say, I did it. So it's a very kind of intimate experience

compared to just reading. And that can be really powerful for people. Yeah, I had on the show a couple of years ago, the philosopher C.T. Nguyen, are you familiar with his work? He was really wonderful guest and he has a wonderful theory about games as an art form that it's what they play with

is agency as art, that the ability to do some things and not others, so you play Mario and you have this athletic agency and you can experience what it's like to have the sort of athleticism Mario does. And that is the feeling, that agency is what the designer is playing with in an artistic way versus a game

that's playing with the idea of, you know, your agency is as a diplomat or your agency is whatever. And I think that's such a cool frame of analysis. Maybe it doesn't explain every game under the sun, but it explains so much of what I like in games that it gives me the feeling of not just being another person, but being another way of being in a way. Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah. I love his work and I love that idea. And in my neuroscience work, I was actually, I was not thinking about games at the time, but I was also studying agency and like sort of how do we learn to do new things? I made brain machine interfaces and the kind of amazing thing about that technology is that the brain can just learn to control

like a robotic arm or a computer screen. And there's nothing in evolution that should allow for that to happen, but we just learn this thing. And this is the amazing thing about the brain is it's like plastic and brilliant and good at learning things. Yeah, it's just a really beautiful framework of looking at games because they're about making decisions. And when the Renaissance mathematicians realized that chance was this like knowable thing, suddenly we could like collect data and make better decisions

because we would have a better sense of like what the probability of X was. Like suddenly we could say there's 50% chance of rain tomorrow. Like it's crazy that that seems such a prosaic thing today, but at the time it was mind blowing. Like, and it's still, it's still kind of is mind blowing that we're able to predict anything about the future. So it gives us more leverage over the future and having that kind of mathematics. And, and this was all thanks again to like looking at games

and like thinking about how we make decisions in uncertain situations. That is so cool. And it also makes me think about what I like about games, or one thing that I like about them is there's a phrase, I don't remember where it comes from, probably a very brilliant game designer said it, but you know, games are a series of interesting decisions that a fun game gives you a series of interesting decisions to make. And I've been thinking about that a lot when I'm playing a game that I get bored by, it's when there's no decisions to make, and it just sort of feels like it's on rails,

and there's no challenge, there's no options. I'm just sort of going through the motions, whereas a game that makes me make choice after choice after choice after choice, and each choice is interesting and has an outcome, I tend to find kind of addictive. And what's interesting about that is that I have a really hard time making decisions in real life.

This is actually a, like, this is like my girlfriend tells me, she's like, you really have a lot of trouble making decisions, you just need to choose something and stop asking me what the best decision is, you know? But I feel, will feel tortured sometimes by like, what do I wear to go out tonight, you know, or whatever it is.

And so the experience in a game of making a decision, making decisions rapidly that do matter, except they don't matter because it's within a game, I think is powerful and addictive to me. Today's episode is sponsored by Delete Me, friends of the show and a service that I have personally used and trusted for years before they even started advertising with us.

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because of how they affect the real world. That we learn something scientific from them or they affected human history, they affected thermonuclear war, or we can learn something that we can put into practice in our daily lives, they're functional in some way, right? And all those things are wonderful, and I often use those to describe why games are good, when I'm trying to convince people.

At the same time, to me, they somehow feel like they're missing the point, because isn't the point of a game that it doesn't matter? Like, the fun thing, or the enjoyable thing, or the reason you want to engage in a game at all, is that it is a space that does not, where the outcome does not matter. Even when you look at, you know, puppies playing, they are fighting, but the outcome,

you know, one's on their back and one's on top, neither of them actually cares which one's winning or losing. You know, in the context of a game, you know, one's on their back and one's on top. Neither of them actually cares which one's winning or losing. You know, in the context of a game, you might get mad and competitive, but you know that if you're mad at your friend because they beat you at a game an hour after the game's over, that you've made a mistake. And when we're mad at a sports team, oh, my team's losing,

well, it's fun to be angry or to be invested in the outcome of an event that you know doesn't actually affect your life, because it doesn't, you know, you're still gonna be able to pay rent tomorrow or not pay rent tomorrow, no matter how well the Lakers do at the game. And so to me, that seems to be an essential thing about games that they don't matter.

And yet when we are trying to talk about why games are important, we keep talking about ways in which they do matter. And so I guess my question is, is there an importance in the not mattering that we can talk about? Yeah, that's a really, I really like the way you put that.

I think that's a really good insight. And I think it's absolutely something people miss a lot when they kind of extol the virtues of games, because games ultimately are just like, at best models of the world, they're simulations or they're never like perfect. And as an example, you know, back to Kriegerspiel in World War I, the Germans were using Kriegerspiel to plan an invasion and they decided they were going to like go through Belgium to do this thing. And they planned it out perfectly and it worked really well.

It worked exactly like they expected, except they didn't plan for the diplomatic fallout of going through Belgium and invading a neutral country. So games like only can kind of contain what their rules include. And yeah, so, and then also their rules can be sort of didactic in a sense. So another example of this is like SimCity,

which Will Wright made in the 90s. And he was like designing another game and realized that designing video game levels was super fun and other people should be able to do it. So he made this game where people could design a city and he based it on these real equations of an urban designer, Jay Forrester. But the problem is Jay Forrester was this like raging libertarian and his all of his equations were kind of like ultimately trying to show that like any kind of regulation in a city

is like a bad idea. And so it turns out like if you play some city a lot, you can get a giant city that works and is very steady state and easy to take care of if you just have nothing but population and a huge police force. No public services, nothing else. Games can feel like this really objective way of looking at the world, but they're always, they always have some kind of, they're based on some assumption, they're based on some dynamic, they're artificial. And even so, even the probability theory, for example, the probability, the randomness of dice

is not the same kind of randomness of events in the real world. And this is actually a huge problem because like, when people, when scientists model their experimental results using the same statistics as the ones of dice, for example, they get all kinds of weird results. And this is probably underlying like the replication crisis in science.

And the same is true of like the 2009 financial crisis is one thought of where that came from was a lot of people were using this black Scholes model, which was like an estimate of risk, but they're estimating risk at the, this rate that was like similar to that of like, of dice rather than the risk of real, the real world, which has like much more likely to have like big outlier events. And then this misestimation of risk ended up like collapsing the stock market or the housing market or whatever. So, yeah, so I think, you know, it seems in some ways,

it seems like games are this really powerful model of the world, but there's a lot of ways in which they fall short as well. Yeah, but that doesn't make that, does that make them less valuable or does it make it, does it mean it's a misapplication? Yeah, I think they're valuable. I think they're good simulations, but we should always just remember

that that's all they really are is like simulations. Yeah. Yeah, I think part of this was inspired or part of my like rant, comes out of like, I worked at DeepMind, the AI company, and Demis Asabas, the CEO, was always talking about, maybe we can replace politicians because we'll have a model of society,

I think, kind of thinking along the Sims line. And it's a very technocratic way of thinking about things. And it always struck me as very naive and yeah. Yeah, and you could replace me with an AI. What am I even doing? It's bizarre that a lot of people think this. Yeah, a lot of people do. And it's such a misunderstanding of humanity

to think that there's always a desire to eliminate politics and eliminate the necessity for group decision-making when in fact, group decision-making is all that humans do. I mean, what are you supposed to, you're literally gonna eliminate the ability of people to have a say in their society or to have an uprising? All you can do is ignore politics.

You can't get rid of it or outsource it. It just exists, you know? Yeah, and that's kind of like what's scary about things like game theory, when it's like trying to model humans with a model that doesn't actually model humans well at all and trying to kind of predict what we're gonna do with, it's so kind of replacing democratic choice

with the like assumptions of a mathematical model. And that seems really problematic on a lot of levels for a lot of reasons. It's very, it's very foundation Isaac Asimov, Harry Seldin's equations to predict humanity, which everybody loved that book when you were 13 years old and you check out a library and it's like, oh, what a cool idea.

But like, again, it's science fiction, motherfuckers. Like, it's fiction for a reason. It's a fun idea. You don't, you're not supposed to actually do it. It doesn't mean it would actually work, you know? Right, yeah. Is GameLogic present in these AI companies since you seem to, you've been there firsthand and seen it?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, yeah, AI was in part inspired by games. So like, Ada Lovelace working on the Difference Engine, the like first computer, wanted to train it to play games because that would help them raise money. They never had money. So they thought this would be like a cool little publicity stunt.

And that has basically been true for like every computer company since then. Like IBM had computer play checkers and then chess, then DeepMind taught computers to play Atari and Go and StarCraft and made a lot of money doing that and also spent a lot of money doing that. It costs a huge amount of money to train computers to play these games. But the ultimate goal was to train computers to build games because it seems like to play games, you need intelligence. So the hope was like Claude Shannon, the father of information theory,

and like Alan Turing, the father of computing, both came up with this in the like 1940s. Like what if we just taught computers to play games and then we could call them intelligent? And we have, you know, since taught computers to play games and it made them able to play games. It did not make them intelligent. So, you know, and you can also look at like a really high level chess player. They're super smart and they're super good at chess. Doesn't mean they're smart at other things. So, the kind of intelligence trained in a game

does not necessarily generalize. That's some kind of other very mystical thing that was like AI companies have really not figured out yet. So yeah, I think a lot of people are still thinking of games as like, this is the realm that we're gonna get intelligences. And now that we've kind of run out of board games and video games to train computers on,

their goal is kind of to like gamify aspects of reality because they now have the algorithms that can like play whatever game. So if they can like turn some aspect of reality into a game, they can make progress in the real world. So this works in some cases like science where they've kind of gamified certain physics questions like protein folding, like how can we predict

how a protein will fold so that we can target drugs to whatever protein we're looking at. That's something deep-minded. It's really cool. But then we also have things like where they're gamifying language. So that's what like language models are doing basically where they're kind of trained to like take, you know, take a giant corpus of data, take certain words out, guess what words are missing in that like training data. And then by guessing missing words, they kind of build up this like language, this interdependent network of understanding of language. So they kind of can like play at language, but they can't really, they don't, there isn't

like an understanding there. And that's why they're kind of bullshit machines really. That is such a fascinating connection between computer models or artificial intelligence is designed to play chess or go or that sort of thing with large language models that they're, it's sort of a similar thing that they're trying to do. I think it's particularly fascinating to me because as you were talking, I was thinking about how,

you know, the project of creating a computer that can beat a human at chess is a little bit besides the point. Like it is cool, right? But humans don't actually play chess in order to win chess. Like the goal of chess is not to beat, beat chess, beat the other person, be the best. An individual player can choose that as a goal,

but why do humans play chess? For fun. You know, like as artistic expression, as a way of learning, you know, new ways of thinking, as there's all these other reasons, humans are gonna stop playing chess because the computer is better at it. You know, it's like, oh, okay,

well, we could use the computer to help teach us to be better at chess, blah, blah, blah. More people are playing chess because the computer is better at it. You know, it's like, oh, okay, well, we could use the computer to help teach us to be better at chess, blah, blah, blah. More people are playing chess than ever. The sport is like undergoing a boom right now. You can say the same thing of go, et cetera. And so that actually makes me really understand why large language models are bullshit

because yeah, they can produce large amounts of text that like even a lot of humans can't produce. Well, yeah, who gives a shit? Point isn't just like producing text. That's not the point of writing or reading the point of writing or reading is for pleasure for communication for all of these other things that we use it for because it's a human activity. It's not a because it's a human activity. It's not a computer activity. And so there's like a, there's a category error happening here on a deep level that this is making clear to me.

Thank you. Yeah, no, that's, yeah. And the AI researcher, John McCarthy, got really depressed at some point because all these researchers had gotten so obsessed with like just having their computers win games without really like caring whether it was telling us

anything about intelligence. And he likened it to like, it's as if geneticists took fruit flies and like raced the fruit flies rather than using them to like study genes. That is such an incredible comparison. Yeah, because who cares about, the point wasn't to make a great fruit fly.

The point wasn't to make something great at chess. It was to learn something more broadly. Like, I think the question should not be, can you make a computer that's great at chess? It's, can you build a computer that plays chess for fun? Yeah, or. That would be intelligence. Yeah, or a computer that could invent a game like chess.

Right, right, because that is what humans really did was we don't just play it, we created the game. Yeah. That is so fucking cool. I love getting to a real galaxy brain moment like that on a podcast like this. Are there any dangers to games themselves? We've talked about game logic being misapplied to the real world.

So let's set that aside because that's one. I also think about, you know, sometimes when I play a video game, I'm like, what a wonderful tonic for depression this can be, right? Because what a lot of video games do is in real life, it's hard to complete a task. You know, tasks are vague. It's hard to do them. You don't really get a reward.

And in a video game, a lot of video games say, hey, here's 10 things I want you to do. You can check them off real quick, right? And it can give people, especially people who are depressed, right? And that's a real problem. It can give them a sense of accomplishment that I think could be valuable.

And I have actually experienced this myself. You know, there are moments when I've played the Dark Souls series of games where I literally transcended myself because I did something that I thought was impossible. You know, I was, there's a clip that is still in my Twitch stream of me playing Sekiro and fighting this boss over and over again

and being like, I cannot do this. I cannot do this. I'm so mad. Oh, I'm so mad. And then I was like, my final run. And then on my final run, I beat the boss perfectly. I blocked every attack, parry, parry, parry, hit, hit, hit. I like did it perfectly.

And I was like, I can't believe I did that. I did something. I experienced self-transcendence. And that was such a powerful experience for me of learning on a deep level that then produced a result that I didn't even know I was capable of. And that was something that, you know, I could apply to other parts of my life

in the same way that the first time I ran a marathon, it taught me something about my own endurance that I didn't know. And so I was able to take that experience with me. That's the good version. The bad version is sometimes people just, well, that's the only kind of accomplishment that they pursue, you know?

And they maybe get stuck in that rut. You know, I've seen that happen to folks as well. And so I'm just curious if you have any dangers about games, because more people are playing more games than ever on a wider scale, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that's a really good, that's a good one. And I've had the same experience of like playing way

too much Animal Crossing or something when I was super depressed. Like not proud of it, but it got me through some tough times. But I think, you know, there's some obvious ones as well. Like certain games are addicting and game designers are increasingly putting these kind of like insidious addictive elements to get people to pay more money or spend more time or spend more attention on their game. And then I think the other one is kind of philosophical,

which is like games can kind of play us. So when you play Monopoly, you have to, to like win it, you have to act like a cutthroat capitalist and like stab your siblings in the back to win, even if you're like a total hippie, lovey-dovey person at heart. So when we play games, we have to kind of like mold ourselves, mold our values to the games we're playing. And part of the danger here is that like there's a lot of games and game design in our everyday technological experiences, like in dating apps, in social

media, on shopping sites, where, you know, we're kind of being played by these game dynamics. And so looking at ways in which we're being encouraged to abandon our own values to win at a certain game, whether that's social media or if we are working at a gamified platform, like working for Uber, gigging for Uber or something. Right, right. And I've experienced that on apps.

I look at my Uber driver's like screen whenever I'm in one and I see how gamified it is. Or I think about, you know, Twitch I mentioned earlier has a completely gamified backend to try to convince people to stream more. And even though they're not being paid, you know, oh, if you get all the achievements, then maybe one day you'll make a little bit of money at this.

Like that's a really nefarious trend. Right, yeah. Yeah, and then- Or Amazon does this as well in their warehouses, right? That's a really clear example. Right, and they work people too hard and it's ultimately like, gamification is basically you're getting a lot,

if it's like through a work, like, gamification is basically, you're getting a lot, if it's like through a work, like an employer, you're being aligned with your employer's values, not necessarily your values. So you really have to think about like, how am I getting nudged here? Yeah, and I mean, it's important to look at the game systems in our everyday lives, you know? I also think another good one is Freakin' Flyer Miles

is a real game system that encourages you to try to game it. And I travel a lot because I'm a standup comic. And so I unfortunately almost have to play the game because it's just, that's the, I don't know. When you fly as much as I do, you're sort of dumb if you don't do it. But then you find yourself, it's designed in such a way that is meant to get you

to put more money in your credit card, to pay a little bit more money because then I'll get the points on my main airline and all that sort of thing. And I feel myself being the victim of the system. Yeah, they're really good. They got a lot of good psychologists on this. And yeah, all you can do is be aware, I guess.

Are there, now that we are learning more about games, right, that more people are taking games more seriously, game design is a bigger field, or game studies is a bigger field at universities across America. Is there a frontier in what we know or what we are creating about games that you're excited about in the future?

I think, yeah, I mean, game design and kind of mechanism design is, is where I'm most excited about where the board, the board game designer, Reiner Kinesia talks about when he designs a game, the first thing he does is design the scoring system because that's how you get the behavior you want. And of course, you know, the players will play the game you want them to play if you have the scoring system in the right setup the way it should be. And of course, there's dangers to that, like we just discussed, where we can get manipulated by that.

But there's also really amazing ways you can incentivize great behaviors through, for example, mechanism design is also known as reverse game theory. And these game theorists have designed like kidney exchange markets so that people who need kidneys but like don't have a match can like find a match. So there's a lot of really cool ways of like, you know

we can't use a traditional market where like we would use money to like incentivize exchange, but we're going to find these other ways of incentivizing a certain behavior. That is so cool. And yeah, I mean, I hope as it develops, you come back sometime to tell us more about it. Are there any, yeah, I don't know, any final thoughts that you have to share with folks about like how they might think differently about games they encounter in the world as a result of, you know, these insights or has it changed the way that you see games in your life? Well, I think one thing is it really made me look at like,

what are the games I'm playing? For example, like, you know, if you're working at a corporate job, uh, how does promotion work and how do the behaviors of the employees at your place result from that system? And how do you think you're gonna get promoted versus how does the system actually work? Sometimes we think the world should work a certain way and we try to work in the way we think the world should work and it really works this other way.

And ultimately your life will be easier if you play the game as it is, which is kind of unfortunate, but you know, if you're looking for ways to make your life easier, that's one way of just like, what is the game that I'm, what are the games I'm kind of moving in and how do I play them in the least effortful manner

to get the results I want? So I think, yeah. If you look at your life as a game to be played. Yeah, and then I think also kind of thinking about that can also kind of inspire sort of like systems level thinking of like, even if you, you know, create your own games, like build your own little games, you know, pen and paper even,

just to kind of like get a systems level thinking of like, how can I incentivize a particular behavior in players or how can I get people to work a certain way can be kind of interesting thought experiment for like, you know, games are ultimately manipulators. That is so cool. And this entire conversation has been so fascinating. Thank you so much for coming on the show

to share it with us. The name of the book is Playing with Reality, How Games Have Shaped Our World. Of course, you can get a copy at our special bookshop if you're listening at factuallypod.com slash books. Where else can people find it? Where can they find your work, Kelly? I'm on Twitter, Kelly B. Clancy,

or my website's kellybclancy.com. Awesome, thank you so much for being here. It's been awesome. Thanks so much for having me. It's been a pleasure. Thank you once again to Kelly for coming on the show. If you wanna pick up a copy of her book, you can head to factuallypod.com slash books.

And just a reminder, when you buy there, you'll be supporting not just this show, but your local bookstore as well. But if you want to support the show directly, of course you can do so on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad free for 15 bucks a month.

I will read your name at the end of this podcast and put it in the credits of every one of my video monologues. This week I wanna thank Eden Welch, Patrick Flanagan, Krattone, Lins Latt, Andrew Empurafoy, and Marcus Mitchell. Thank you so much for your support. Patreon.com slash Adam Conover if you wanna join them and I thank you so much for supporting.

I also wanna thank my producers, Sam Roudman and Tony Wilson, everybody here at HeadGum for making the show possible. You can find my tickets and tour dates at adamconever.net. Just a reminder, I'm headed to Phoenix, Toronto, Canada. This is gonna be in early 2025, but you know, we're booking far ahead,

so I have time to find my passport. And until then, we'll see you next time on Factually. Thank you so much for listening. I don't know anything. I don't know anything!