Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World

Playing with Reality by Kelly Clancy is a thought-provoking exploration of how games have shaped human progress, understanding, and society itself—and what happens when we lose sight of the line between play and reality.

The book traces the intellectual and cultural history of games from the Enlightenment to the modern age, revealing that games are far more than entertainment—they are tools for learning, modeling the world, and predicting the future. We use them to understand human behavior, train the mind, and even simulate complex systems like economies and wars.

Clancy, a neuroscientist and physicist, demonstrates how deeply games are woven into the evolution of human thought and innovation. She shows how:

• Military war games influenced real-life battle strategies and outcomes in 19th- and 20th-century Europe.

• Game theory reshaped our understanding of rationality, economics, and politics—sometimes pushing humanity toward peril, such as during the Cold War.

• Computers and AI learned from games, as seen in machines mastering chess and Go, leading to algorithms that now influence daily life and social structures.

But Clancy also issues a warning: when society confuses the simplified logic of games with the complexity of real life, we risk letting “gamification” dominate decision-making, ethics, and democracy itself.

Combining history, science, and philosophy, Playing with Reality argues that our fascination with games—from playgrounds to politics, from chessboards to computer code—is not just a pastime, but a window into human nature. It’s a revelatory look at how play has both driven and distorted the course of civilization.