ABSTRACT
In this book you are invited to play a game. As in all games, you must decide how seriously you want to play. One thing we know very well: Games can easily draw us into their own reality, raising our passions and our blood pressure. The ability to engage so readily in fantasy is a marvelous human gift that can be turned to great advantage in education and intellectual exploration. A sense of subjective involvement can enliven what might otherwise be dry, objective study. Games may be especially helpful when we are trying, like anthropologists, to understand the circumstances of people who lead very different lives, encouraging us to project our minds into the experiences of others. This is especially true if we are hying to bridge the conceptual gap between people who live in poor communities in distant parts of the world and those of us closer to the centers of power. Unless we take better account of these diverse points of view, we are unlikely to be able to propose effective remedies to the problems of poverty or to discover what sorts of “development” are preferable or practicable.
