‘A dopamine hit on every page’ Marcus du Sautoy A sweeping intellectual history of games and their importance to human progress. We play games to learn about the world, to understand our minds and the minds of others, and to practice making predictions about the future. Games are thought to be older than written language, and have now become the dominant cultural media—bigger than movies, TV, music, and literature combined. They are also fun. But as neuroscientist and physicist Kelly Clancy argues, it’s time we started taking them more seriously. In Playing With Reality, she chronicles the riveting and hidden history of games since the Enlightenment, weaving an unexpected path through military theory, biology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and the future of democracy. Games, Clancy shows us, have been deeply intertwined with the arc of history. War games shaped the outcomes of real wars in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe. Game theory warped our
