Kelly explores the history of play and games with Kelly Clancy, a neuroscientist and physicist who has held research positions at MIT, University of California – Berkley, University College London and the AI company DeepMind. She has a new book, it’s called “Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World.”

Why has there been so little science done about play?

“The interesting thing is that it’s actually hard. It’s been hard for neuroscientists to study play because it’s such a deeply ingrained behavior. First of all, it’s evolutionarily ancient. Most mammals play, reptiles, birds, fish, all play. There’s some evidence that insects play and bees play. So, it’s all over the animal kingdom, and it’s hard to cut it out to study. Decades ago, scientists did this experiment where they surgically removed the cortex of baby rats. So, this is the part of the brain that we think of as being responsible for higher intelligence. So, they cut it out, and the rats grew up still playing. It’s one of these behaviors that is just so innate and so strong that it’s actually, you know, quite hard to study. ”

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So why were you interested in studying games and play?

“I think I was partly drawn to the study of games because I was working at DeepMind when I started this book, which is the AI company known for creating computer programs that bested human champions at games like Go. And it was also Covid lockdown, and I was rediscovering video games as a way to pass the time and having a great time. And I was like, ‘Wow! Games are incredibly captivating.’ And businesses are spending hundreds of millions of dollars just to make programs to play them. What is so interesting about games? Why are we so fascinated? Why is there such a long history throughout evolution throughout human history of this obsession with games? And even though I think they’re often trivialized and kind of seen as unimportant, the more I looked into it, the more I realized games really underpin the basis of how we see the world and how we move in the world.”

I was taken with the idea of how people have used game theory to justify a lot of terrible behavior.

“Right. And it’s really kind of tragic that this idea that comes from game theory, which is that people are ultimately totally selfish, self-interested decision makers is not at all supported by the psychological evidence. And well, I mean, it’s not even really supported by game theory, because game theory is not a model of people. It’s just math. It’s like a series of mathematical equations. So, it’s a kind of bizarre thing that we’ve brought this notion that we’re all selfish into the world because it has then kind of been used to justify selfish behaviors.”

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Photo Credit: Nancy Rothstein