How games and game theory have changed the world
Playing with Reality: How Games Shape Our World. By Kelly Clancy. Riverhead Books; 368 pages; $30. Allen Lane; £25 In 1824 Prince Wilhelm of Prussia asked for a demonstration of an elaborate game he had heard about from his military tutor.
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 a real battlefield. Wooden blocks represented different military formations; each turn of the game simulated two minutes of battlefield combat.
Damage was worked out 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 cats had to be banished from the vicinity, so they did not climb on the board and mess up the pieces. Game theory, war games, probability theory, artificial intelligence, social media, gamification, Nash equilibrium, prisoner's dilemma, mutually assured destruction, economics, behavioural economics, cognitive biases, neoliberalism The prince was enchanted, and every Prussian officer was ordered to learn to play the game.
It allowed new tactics to be tried out, even in peacetime. The rules were constantly updated with new weapons and statistics. When Wilhelm became king, Prussia’s unexpectedly swift victory in 1871 in the Franco-Prussian war was attributed to these gamed simulations.
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