A Novel that Turns the Tables on AI

What’s the point of playing? Games don’t provide an organism with food, water, or shelter.

They distract from the pursuit of survival and reproduction.

And yet play is found across the animal kingdom; the act separates creative, joyful, living creatures from “merely mechanical things,” as the Dutch historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga once put it.

In his famous 1938 study on games and play, Homo Ludens , Huizinga asserts that the behavior represents something fundamentally absurd: Humans “play and know that we play, so we must be more than merely rational beings, for play is irrational.” Huizinga’s analytical understanding of leisure remains influential in the fields of philosophy and game design.

Perhaps this is why the British writer Joanna Kavenna, halfway through her zany, cerebral romp of a novel, Seven , quotes at length from Huizinga.

Play is necessary, she quotes him as saying, even if “we live in a demented world.” Humans aren’t robots, Kavenna seems to be reminding us.

And her novel, which lands during a moment when the biggest question about robots is whether they’ll kill us all, offers a jaunty insight: When we embrace our irrationality, we deepen our understanding of what separates us from our computers.

The plot and thematic structure of Seven are guided by an invented board game, Seven, which resembles chess and involves a spiral-shaped board known as the “box.” The game involves seven movable pieces and two six-sided dice, and its rules are flexible; the novel itself is punctuated by four separate sets of instructions. (This slipperiness will become important later on.) In the same way that chess has been used by writers and artists as a metaphor for war or existential struggle, Seven becomes a symbol for how humans attempt to make sense of their world’s incoherence.

Kavenna’s characters are deadly serious about their game, but the author is willing to poke fun at them.

The action begins in a university philosophy department in Oslo, where the nameless, genderless narrator works as a research assistant to an Icelandic philosopher named Alda Jónsdóttir.