外刊阅读 | Scientificamerican | 游戏主宰着我们的生活

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Many researchers have sought a theory of quantum gravity, which would introduce gravity into quantum mechanics and explain everything from the subatomic to the supergalactic realms.

许多研究人员一直在寻找一种量子引力理论，该理论将引力引入量子力学，并解释从亚原子到超星系领域的一切。

How Game Designers Secretly Run Your Life

游戏设计师如何暗中掌控你的生活

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We can learn a lot about ourselves as a species by studying what fascinates us. People have been captivated by games for millennia, and today the gaming market is about as big as all other forms of entertainment combined. Play is often dismissed as trivial, but it is evolutionarily ancient: most mammals and some birds, reptiles, fish and even insects play. It’s been one of the more challenging behaviors for neuroscientists to study because it is so difficult to suppress. If you surgically remove a rat’s entire rindlike cortex—the structure believed to be responsible for higher intelligence—the animal will still play.

Why is this behavior so deeply ingrained? The brain builds models of the world to anticipate events, but games are all about uncertainty. Unpredictable events are particularly fascinating because their unpredictability means something is missing in the brain’s world model. Uncertainty is like a signpost indicating that there’s more to learn. Children stop tic-tac-toe once they realize that, played correctly, it always ends in a draw. Through play, we learn how to handle the unknown.

Long before neuroscientists studied play’s role in social learning, Plato argued that games were vital because they taught children to follow rules. In the future, as citizens, they’d respect laws. Medieval aristocrats were required to learn chess because it was thought to act like a mirror for one’s character: they’d learn about themselves. Philosophers similarly celebrated the ancient game of Go for honing its players’ insight. Competitive games are ultimately about cooperation. They train us to obey rules and achieve arbitrary goals in a fair and socially sanctioned way. Games are a kind of domestication.

Games also revealed profound truths about reality—or so it seemed. As casinos became popular in Renaissance Europe, gamblers who sought an edge studied how dice worked. Their efforts to mathematize gambling led to the birth of probability theory, one of empiricism’s most astonishing early successes. Chance—then thought to reflect the whim of God—could, in fact, be studied and systematized. It operated according to laws. That the very unpredictability of die throws could be formalized was revolutionary.

Today the business world uses probability theory as its lingua franca, and economic ventures are reframed as bets. The implications of this ramify through today’s stock markets and their myriad financial derivatives. The connection goes even deeper than that. Because games are so good at shaping our behaviors, they’ve been adopted in the design of many of our modern social and economic systems. Now game design dictates what ads we’re served as we scroll through our feeds, how we’re paired on dating apps and how we’re matched with jobs.

Games train us to obey rules and achieve arbitrary goals in a fair and socially sanctioned way. Games are a kind of domestication.

游戏训练我们遵守规则，以公平和社会认可的方式实现任意目标。游戏是一种驯化。

That’s why it’s crucial that we understand how these games influence us so that we can sieve out our actual values from those of the designers. Otherwise, the games are playing us.

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