I just finished Kelly Clancy’s Playing With Reality. It is very good for many reasons but I want to just concentrate on the word Imperialization that occurs four times in the book.
The book is concerned with the ideas of games and how we perceive and move thru reality. The ideas of Game Theory and Gamification are core to the book and are heavily criticised.
What the four uses of Imperialization enable is a narrative. A story about the effects of maths upon how we think about reality and how politicians and business people construct and constrict consensus reality.
Mention 1
Hilbert’s dream: math would eventually imperialize all fields of knowledge. No inquiry would remain resistant to quantification.
Early in the book there is a discussion of Von Neumann and his ideas of what using maths to understand problems could perfect.
This is the root. That to understand and to question problems, you need to use maths. The arguments and discussions will be clearer in numbers than text.
Mention 2
Games Theory..this once niche mathematical discipline has imperialized many social sciences, including economics, political science, law, ethics, and psychology.
The next shift is how the form of maths used to question and understand problems became constricted too.
Games Theory, in the 1950’s, becoming the frame for understanding decision-making and human behaviour. This theory seemed to offer clarity to many people. For the military, it automated impossible decisions about nuclear warfare. Yet that clarity was based on ignoring some ‘inconvenient’ research results: the ones where stability and mutual kindness were found.
In the 1950s, game theorists discovered that some repeated games support an infinite number of stable equilibrium strategies. This became known as the folk theorem, because it was such an obvious outcome that no one bothered formally publishing it.
Mention 3
The more that reality is imperialized by games-the metaverse, the gamification of work, social media-the more vulnerable we’ll be to these simulacra.
The word reappears much later in the book in the chapters about how maths and models are used in Gamification and behavioural design.
That the games theory built from maths has now become the frame around people. Their lives and choices held within the rules and logic of maths.
Thus the maths and its simulacra are reality and real people and people need to comply to that. The model, the maths are the limits of real.
Mention 4
As games have continued to imperialize our everyday lives, they’ve come to replace traditional values and relationships with rigid and unrealistic models.
The final mention completes that sense of trap.
If the games theory maths is describing perfectly humans then morals and ethics are in many ways irrelevant. The rigid models enclose people.
However, this cannot and must not be true.
The models are not reality. They are unrealistic.
An Imperial Story
What the four mentions create is the opening of the trap and the closing of it.
Maths offered as a solution to finding clarity. Maths, more specifically Games Theory, becoming an addiction to academic researchers because it offers such clarity in social sciences.
Games becoming a way of talking about social regulation and behaviour. The games becoming the only way of behaving.
The Imperialization of Maths.
How we live in a Quant’ie World.
It’s plastic.
It’s not fantastic.