Book Review: “Seven Games” by Oliver Roeder

Seven Games by Oliver Roeder

Roeder is a writer and a game player, and this book combines his strengths.  These seven games (checkers, chess, go, backgammon, poker, scrabble, and bridge) are mostly ancient, and globally popular.  In addition to clubs and tournaments, they have literatures and institutions.  This is, indeed culture.

Roeder discusses the history and culture of each game, with a dose of journalism and, in most cases, personal experience.  It is interesting to read his analysis of what is the essence of each game, why they are hard, why they are interesting.  Throughout, we learn that each of these games asks different skills of the player.

The subtitle (“A Human History”) is quite misleading in one important way.  Each of these games has been impacted by digital technology.  Several have been “broken”, with the creation of computer programs that can beat any human.  This is a cultural watershed, one which has been crossed more than once in this book. 

When this happens, the community of players is forced to rethink what the game means, and what playing means.  If software plays better than humans, what does that mean?  And is the game worth playing, if no human can be as good as an inhuman program?  At the same time, these programs have taught humans to play better (and different), in hybrid human-computer teams.

As a software guy, I was interested in the different kinds of digital system that were needed to “break” these games.  Scrabble is a giant dictionary game at the core (plus anagramming).  Checkers is a tree search game.  Go is a pattern recognition game.  Poker is a probability game.  And so on.

It was also cool to read about these technical developments that covered most of my own career. (I recall all the old systems mentioned, back when they and I were young and relevant.)  It is easy for me to recognize that much of this story is my old friend, Moore’s Law.  The techniques aren’t necessarily all that innovative, but getting it to work fast enough and cheap enough depended on the rising tide of digital technology. It’s pretty much what my career was all about.

As an old anthropology major, I also liked reading about these weird sub-cultures.  In my nerdy career, I have, of course, encountered chess and bridge nuts, etc., of course, so most of this rings true from my own experience.  It is interesting to see how the digital technology is changing these cultures, and, as noted, creating digital-human hybrid behaviors.  Fascinating.

These hybrids are certainly threatening the game cultures.  In the case of Go, the computer systems play not only better, but weirdly different.  Consequently, humans are re-learning the game from the computer. 

In other cases, computer tutoring has raised the level of play at the bottom, upending the social and economic ecosystem.  Even if computers aren’t dominating the apex games, there aren’t as many chumps to easily beat, or beginners to pay you for lessons. How are you gonna eat? 

I haven’t played bridge since high school, so I was surprised to learn that it is dying.  And, for once, it doesn’t seem to be dying because of digital technology playing better than humans. Computers haven’t cracked bridge, it’s too social.  

It looks to me like bridge is dying due a poor economic model. Basically, professional bridge has operated on a pre-industrial, feudal, patronage model, kind of like yacht racing or horse racing.  Shockingly enough, this isn’t sustainable at scale.

So—this book is certainly a “human history”, but in the twenty first century this means that it is a story about the social impact of digital technology.  Roeder does a good job portraying the human culture surrounding these games, and a decent job reporting on the digital stuff.

And, by the way, this is a pretty good place to look to understand the “oh, no, AI is replacing humans” thing.  Computers and AI have had huge impacts on these sub-cultures, and have “broken” Chess and Go.  But these cultures, all of them, are evolving and creating new cultures that include digital technology and human creativity together.  These are, as Roeder himself says, models for how wider culture and work will evolve.

As always, games are far more important than just “fun”.

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1. Oliver Roeder, Seven Games: A Human History, New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2022.

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