THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 9AS AN ADOLESCENT,I fancied myself a dev-
otee of the ancient Chinese board game Go.
I had never actually played it, but in one of
my favorite novels — “Shibumi,” by Treva-
nian — the super-assassin hero praised Go
as a fitting pastime for the kind of warrior/
poet/lover he was and that I hoped to be-
come. “Go is to Western chess what philos-
ophy is to double-entry accounting,” he
says, probably before killing someone with
a toothpick. Sadly, when I actually tried to
play Go, it turned out be... a board game,
and a difficult one at that. I gave it up when
I realized that in return for the labor of
truly learning Go, I would become not an
enlightened international assassin, but
just a guy who could play a game.
Oliver Roeder, a student of games and
game theory, is deeply aware of the tension
between what games are and what people
project onto them; he even quotes that line
from “Shibumi” to start the chapter on Go
in his new book, “Seven Games.” His
“group biography” of seven classic games
— checkers, chess, Go, backgammon,
poker, Scrabble and bridge — is in many
ways an interrogation of these questions:
Are games more than their rules and play-
ing pieces? Are they metaphors for deeper
truths of the human experience? Is chess
“life in miniature,” as the former world
champion Garry Kasparov once said? Or is
it just a board game — Risk with more
rules and a boring map?
Like the authors of other successful
books on games, such as Stefan Fatsis’
“Word Freak,” about Scrabble, or “The
Biggest Bluff,” a poker memoir by Maria
Konnikova, Roeder is himself a player, and
like those writers he structures much of his
narrative around his entry in major com-
petitions. (As he ruefully notes, he is yet
another author who used his advance to
buy a seat at the World Series of Poker in
Las Vegas; he loses that advance fairly
quickly.) But his purpose here is not to tell
us how he plays games, but how humans
do, and whether or not that makes us as
special as we like to think.
He begins with the long history of
games, going back 5,000 years to prehis-
toric Mesoamerican settlements, and
asks: Why does almost every society en-
gage in games and why have certain
games survived for centuries? His sug-
gested answers range from the simple —
because we’re bored — to the complex, as
presented by the aptly named philosopher
of games Bernard Suits, who coined the
phrase “lusory mind,” that is, a mind freed
from practical or real concerns and thus
able to ponder immaterial problems. As
Suits put it, a game is “the voluntary at-
tempt to overcome unnecessary obsta-
cles.”
But this book — subtitled “A Human His-
tory” — is not truly a philosophical inquiry.
Nor is it a deep consideration of any of the
games or their star players, though such
people provide much of the joy of the book.
There is Marion Tinsley, an abstemious
Midwesterner of steady habits and deep
religious faith, and the greatest checkers
player who’s ever lived; and Nigel Rich-
ards, an aloof ascetic who lives off the grid
in Malaysia but emerges to dominate ev-
ery Scrabble competition he enters. And
while backgammon’s roots are buried in
Egyptian tombs, it was a Russian expatri-
ate named Prince Alexis Obolensky who
popularized the game as a jet-setter’s pas-
time in the 1960s.But none of these people
are the book’s central characters. Instead,
this is the story of people like Jonathan
Schaeffer (checkers), Gerald Tesauro
(backgammon) and Jason Katz-Brown
(Scrabble). They are players, yes, often
very good ones. But they are here for their
skill at programming computers.
Each of the primary sections of this book
reads like a tragedy, a repeating myth of
hubris told with different characters but
the same ending, so that by the third or
fourth telling you start to dread what youknow is coming. Every game has its his-
tory, its champions, its quirks and its com-
munity, and then comes the programmer
who believes he can teach a computer to
play it. Each time, devotees of the game
stake their claim that their pastime is a
pure expression of ineluctable human cre-
ativity, and then, as the programs improve,
the players are stripped of their illusions.
The human champion ends up in a hotel
ballroom across a game board from some
young programmer who sits next to a box
that tells him what to do, and each time the
box eventually wins. The game they
thought was an art is just another mecha-
nism, no more inaccessible to the brute
strength of microprocessors than, say, as-
sembling an automobile. In this respect,
“Seven Games” isn’t so much a biography
of these classic games as their group obitu-
ary.
That tragedy is most profound in its first
telling: Schaeffer, a Canadian computer
scientist who became obsessed with creat-
ing a checkers program that could beat
Tinsley, its greatest champion. Starting
with cabinet-size machines in the 1970s, he
finally managed the feat in 1994, but the tri-
umph was bathed in loss. It was Tinsley’s
last match; the cancer that would soon kill
him was discovered during the course ofplay. The last we see of Schaeffer is at an
airport a decade later, as he’s traveling
with his daughter, whom he hardly saw
while she was growing up because of the
checkers obsession that also cost him his
marriage. Schaeffer receives a message:
The latest, most powerful version of his
program has “solved” checkers, meaning
that there is now an optimum strategy that
can never be beaten by a human being.
By the time computers defeated human
champions at chess, then poker, then
backgammon and Go, the human players
had not so much stopped resisting the in-
evitable as submitted to their betters.
High-level poker, Roeder tells us, no longer
involves playing “the man, not the cards,”
but rather memorizing ideal strategies
spat out by programs running millions of
variations on any given hand. Instead of
gamblers noting one another’s tells, the
game is now dominated by young men
wearing sunglasses and headphones so
their “Game Theory Optimal” strategizing
won’t be affected by such distractions as
another player twitching. After wins or
beats, players check their play against the
programs they’ve purchased, to make sure
they chose the software’s recommended
course of action. You begin to realize that
people aren’t playing one another with the
help of computers; the computers are
playing against other computers, using hu-
mans as fleshy armatures to move the
pieces.
Oddly, the only game yet to be con-
quered by computers is contract bridge,
and my sense of relief at this lone holdout
from the onslaught of A.I. was extin-
guished when Roeder let us know that the
game, a relatively recent addition to the
pantheon of pastimes, is now dying out, its
players trending older and smaller in num-
ber. That might not be a coincidence: Per-
haps by now we’re so used to playing
against, or for, our digital masters that
we’ve lost interest in something so messy
and human that its strategies can’t be sim-
ulated by an online bot.
Yet all of these games persist, even if we
now know that when we play, we are not
unique beings with a divine spark of genius
but merely models in an obsolete genera-
tion of thinking machines. As Roeder notes
in an afterword, the popularity of games
exploded during the pandemic, not just
chess (after the success of the Netflix
drama “The Queen’s Gambit”) but also
modern social games like “CATAN” and
networked video games that were many
people’s only regular mode of social inter-
action while locked inside. To play a game
is, as Professor Suits said, to try to solve a
voluntary problem. But it is also a volun-
tary engagement with another human,
temporary but total, to create a shared nar-
rative of attack, defense, stalemate, vic-
tory and loss. The one thing a computer
can never do is enjoy another computer’s
company. Let us hope that no new genius
arises to teach them how to do that. 0Players Wanted
A group biography of seven iconic games and their enduring appeal.
By PETER SAGAL
A game of Go.PHOTOGRAPH BY CHERYL HATCH/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Every game has its history, its
champions, its quirks and its
community.PETER SAGALis the host of NPR’s “Wait Wait
... Don’t Tell Me!” His latest book is “The
Incomplete Book of Running.”
SEVEN GAMES
A Human History
By Oliver Roeder
320 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $26.95.