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In 1824 Prince Wilhelm of Prussia asked to demonstrate an elaborate game he had heard about from his military teacher. The Kriegsspiel, or war game, had been devised a few decades earlier as a more militarily realistic form of chess. Instead of regular squares, the board was a detailed map of an actual battlefield. Wooden blocks represented various military formations; each turn of the game simulated two minutes of battlefield combat. Losses were ascertained by rolling special dice and using odds-based scoring tables based on casualty statistics from historical battles. The game took two weeks to play, during which all the cats had to be driven away from the vicinity so they wouldn’t climb onto the board and spoil the pieces.
Game theory, war games, probability theory, artificial intelligence, social media, gamification, Nash equilibrium, prisoner’s dilemma, mutually assured destruction, economics, behavioral economics, cognitive bias, neoliberalism
The prince was fascinated, and every Prussian officer was ordered to learn to play the game. This provided an opportunity to try out new tactics even in times of peace. The rules were constantly updated with new weapons and figures. When Wilhelm became king, Prussia’s unexpectedly swift victory in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 was attributed to these game simulations.
By the time of World War I, Kriegsspiel was being used to predict when German battalions were going to run out of ammunition, allowing timely replenishment – what would now be called supply-chain forecasting. In the interwar period, German planners used it to develop Blitzkrieg tactics and simulate the invasion of Czechoslovakia. When Hitler invaded Russia, both sides relied on the game to gauge how the campaign would proceed.
The story of the Kriegspiel is one of many examples presented by Kelly Clancy, a neuroscientist and physicist, in a wide-ranging survey of how games can shape reality. Their story begins in the Renaissance, when mathematicians first developed probability theory, partly so they could understand games of chance involving dice and cards. Games thus helped to reveal that even random events were governed by laws and could be analyzed. The resulting techniques were applied in medicine, population studies, and the analysis of scientific errors. The German polymath Gottfried Leibniz saw games as models of the world, and thought their study could “help perfect the art of thinking”. The creators of the Kriegspiel were inspired by his work.
Such war games inspired John von Neumann’s early forays into what is now known as game theory, a branch of mathematics that its proponents hoped might be a physics of human nature. By the 1950s the theory had evolved into now-familiar ideas such as Nash equilibrium and the prisoner’s dilemma, which consider how adversaries adjust their strategies in response to each other’s actions. Game theory also directly underpinned the idea of ”mutually assured destruction” during the nuclear build-up and stalemate of the Cold War. It has since been applied to fields ranging from trade to development.
In the 21st century, the influence of game-like systems has taken a new, digital form. Social-media platforms resemble games in which users compete for clicks and attention; apps have made dating, fitness and language-learning into games; and anyone who rates too low on eBay, Uber or Airbnb based on other users’ scores is in for a bad time. Games have also been central to the development of artificial intelligence. Modern systems rely on the computational horsepower of graphics chips originally designed to run video games; and games have driven progress in this field, from chess to Go to the ImageNet image-recognition competition.
Gaming’s power to shape reality is undeniable. But Ms. Clancy argues that games are “a map that distorts the territory”. While they may be internally consistent, that does not mean they accurately reflect the world. Yet they are often treated as if they do. Worse, the neat models of reality that game theory provides not only misrepresent reality, she argues, but can distort it in malicious ways by influencing the way people act. Human beings are not the reward-maximizing automata that game theorists and economists assume.
Economists are well aware of this. The field of behavioral economics seeks to understand how psychology, not just logic, affects decision making. Ms. Clancy dismisses it as “one of the least prestigious areas of science” because it is “richly funded by corporations.” She objects to the way behavioral economists refer to “cognitive biases,” as if they are flaws in human thinking, when in fact “they are ways of thinking.” It seems that economists are wrong to apply game theory uncritically, but they are also wrong to try to address its limitations.
According to Ms. Clancy, the overzealous misapplication of game theory is behind many of the world’s problems, including economic exploitation, manipulation of public opinion, racism, and neoliberalism. Some readers may be bored by Ms. Clancy’s demonization of heartless economists and ruthless capitalism. Although games and game-like mechanisms are not inherently evil, she argues, they have been used by “data-hungry technologists” and “greedy business interests” to “wash down questionable beliefs.” She concludes that the challenge is how to use games for good rather than evil; changing existing rules and creating entirely new game-like structures, such as fair voting systems. Philosophical and controversial, this is a provocative and engaging book.
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© 2024, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. From The Economist, published under licence. Original content can be found at www.economist.com.
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