The war-games that taught Reagan to fear nuclear apocalypse
Last month, the Government proposed making it possible for Britons to feed slot machines by means of a debit card, at up to £100 per transaction. This seems an on-the-nose metaphor for how, as social-media-addicted consumers, we’re all perched on a stool, pawing stupidly at a button, hoping that this time we might see three cherries in a row.
It’s an ancient means of mollifying a restive population: bread and circuses, updated a little. But it seems especially apt to an era in which everything is being “gamified”, turned into a contest of points and rewards, from supermarket loyalty-cards to applications for disability benefits. We might also be embroiled in games we can’t see. As with a videogame that nudges you in the right direction and accepts only those actions predetermined as correct, perhaps we think we’re playing when we’re actually being played. But by whom, and to what purpose?
Games and the study of them have always been serious business, as Playing with Reality, Kelly Clancy’s superbly argued history, shows. The numerical calculation of probability was, after all, invented in order to advise Renaissance gentlemen who were addicted to gambling at cards and dice. That was an intellectual revolution: “Here was a way,” Clancy notes beautifully, “to measure the future.” The transformation of this mathematics into statistics enabled Florence Nightingale to argue for better treatment of her patients, as well as for modern meteorologists to forecast the weather, sometimes correctly.
Meanwhile, as Clancy shows, the Prussian tradition of Kriegsspiel – tabletop wargames in which generals would role-play different strategies for forthcoming battles – influenced not only the practice of actual war but the subsequent history of games, from Dungeons & Dragons to every digital orgy of exploding pixellated tanks. The seminal 1983 movie Wargames, in which a young boy hacks into the Pentagon to play what he thinks is a game entitled “global thermonuclear war” against an AI, alarmed Ronald Reagan, then the US president; so did the contemporaneous series of official wargames codenamed Proud Prophet, which showed that any “limited” use of nuclear weapons would always escalate to planetary devastation.
That lesson came too late for the mathematical prodigy John von Neumann, who worked on the Manhattan Project alongside Oppenheimer et al, and also co-invented “game theory”, the formal study of adversarial decision-making. Its most famous result is the “Prisoner’s Dilemma”: two prisoners in separate cells must each decide whether to stay silent or to rat out the other. If neither talks, they will both be sentenced to one year in prison; if only one talks, he will go free while the other gets three years; if they both talk, they will both serve two years. Game theory predicts that for each player, it is rational to betray the other (in the hope of going free), but if they both choose this “rational” option, then the outcome is worse for both than staying silent.
Such a model of conflict might seem too simplified and artificial to inform official decision-making. Yet von Neumann himself thought his calculations proved that it was necessary, soon after the end of the Second World War, to nuke the USSR in a massive pre-emptive first strike. On this matter he petitioned President Truman, who fortunately demurred.
This didn’t, however, harm the reputation of game theory, which began a long march through the institutions, influencing economics, the field of cognitive biases, and “nudge” politics. Its bleak view of human behaviour, Clancy argues, has led directly to a modern world in which we’re forced to be involved in the games of others. Women, for example, are merely success tokens in the games of “pick-up artists” who follow algorithmic seduction tips for incels. “If women are the score,” she notes, “they’re not players with their own agency and so become unwitting pawns in a game they never agreed to participate in.” Meanwhile: “Innocent bank depositors take on the risky bets of their bankers. Retail investors are at the mercy of predatory Wall Street financiers who reckon that the market is zero-sum and act in ways that doom it to be true.”
Playing with Reality is a fascinating and brilliant critique of the many ways in which thinking about games has been used for nefarious purposes, although it’s somewhat thinner as a celebration – which it also aims to be – of the joy and creativity in play itself. At one point, Clancy even claims that “games will be a transformational learning technology”, which is something that pop-eyed tech-ed mountebanks have been saying for at least 30 years without it ever becoming true. In any case, that’s the kind of political instrumentalisation of games that has, in all the other contexts Clancy describes, led to vicious outcomes. Perhaps it’s better, after all, to defend our instinct to play games – from chess to football to Super Mario – as something beautifully useless.
Playing with Reality is published by Allen Lane at £25. To order your copy for £19.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
