Tim Clare
speaker
47 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Tim Clare’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah, Backgammon went through this renaissance where it became really cool, where like the Rolling Stones were playing. But then you go to somewhere like Syria or Iraq or Turkey, and this is a game that has never gone away.
Hi, thank you for having me.
There is something incredible about how games incompletely disconnected civilizations pop up, sometimes around the same time, and look remarkably similar, and there was no contact. So you take something like knuckle bones, right? Rolling dice made out of sheep's ankle bones or goat's ankle bones. That appears like up in Skara Brae, sort of an island north of Scotland.
And it appears right down in Egypt, in ancient Turkey. It appears across, say, The Pacific Islands, you see knuckle bone games appearing, played maybe with shells. These games, we have this idea, we're going to roll some oddly shaped things and we're going to mark some sides and depending on what side lands on it, you're going to score points or you won't score points.
You see that idea is created by humans again and again and again all over the world independently. And it doesn't feel like an obvious idea to me to do that. Well, it does now because we take it for granted. But every civilization at some point has invented the technology of dice and often completely independently of one another.
Well, you've hit upon something really key there, which is that evolutionary psychologists often look at something like play and they go, this presents a problem. Because what is it for? You know, this is a technology that keeps appearing, but it doesn't increase our chances of survival on the face of it. It doesn't increase people's chances of winning a war. So what's going on?
And we've studied... animals because we see play in animals right and we've studied say kittens that play and evolutionary psychologists looked at them and went hey come on there must be this must be training them to hunt but when we've done studies there have been expansive studies on preventing kittens from chasing bulls, chasing, doing these kind of pretend hunting behaviours.
And does it affect their ability to hunt when they grow into adulthood? Not at all. Not at all. So this presents us with a huge conundrum. Why do we play? Now, there are plenty of archaeologists who look at things like chess
any game that involves some kind of strategy and say well this must be teaching us lots of lessons about war this must be training our generals but the fact is that being a great chess player doesn't make you particularly good at commanding an army the skills aren't hugely transferable so I don't know. I do think that games for me are like politics you can touch.
To be able to play a game, to be able to sit around a board and say this piece represents this, this piece represents that, to come up with rules, it requires the ability to negotiate and for abstract thought. And I think those things are definitively huge components of any successful civilization.
Not at all. And the problem is that when you see human beings who haven't had the chance to play growing up, There is evidence that those humans have various emotional and cognitive challenges when they grow into adults. But the key thing there is you can't experimentally randomize that, you know, you can't have a
an experimenter saying we're going to stop these kids from playing so it can only be children who for whatever reason haven't had the opportunity to do that and they've often been deprived of other things in their life and what they did find when they've studied kittens is kittens who've been deprived of the chance of lots of bonding time with their mothers
do become worse hunters so this is the thing is game playing games are tied up with all sorts of other things uh including just hanging around and socializing and all the other wonderful things that human beings do so we don't know whether playing games actually teaches us key life skills or whether
Games are what they would call an epiphenomenon of happiness and normal development, which is that games are something that spontaneously happens when human beings and indeed members of the animal kingdom are thriving.
Okay, so I want to admit a bias here, which is that sometimes people will talk about games teach children the ability to negotiate, they teach you numeracy skills, they help good cognitive development, right? All of that may be somewhat true, but there are probably activities that they could be doing that would do that more efficiently, right?
Like, certainly if you play a lot of games that involve counting, your maths skills will get better. But... There are other things you could be doing that would do that better.
And there's always this niggling worry that I have in the back of my mind that when we start doing that, part of it is the guilt that we have to justify play on the grounds of achieving something important, rather than being an end in itself, that they create joy, that they're a wonderful way to spend our time.
So if I sound a little bit resistant to that, if I keep landing on this side of, well, we don't know for certain,
I have to admit a bias, which is that part of me resists that with my heart, which is to say games don't need to earn their keep, in my opinion, based on optimizing us to be productive adults who thrive in the workplace because they have their own wonderful, wonderful ability, which is to make us enjoy our life and enjoy time with others.
One of the key things about Monopoly is that it was never originally designed to be fun. It was designed to teach an economics lesson and a lesson about how monopolies can destroy a healthy economic system. So the game was meant to feel unfair. It was meant to end with one person
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