Closed Circuits: From Board Games to Artificial Intelligence

by Dan Roque | Reading Time: 3 minutes | In Metaphors & Analogies

Everyday establishments—from high-end restaurants to your run-of-the-mill convenience stores—thrive on their predictability. The same principle applies to educational institutions, media outlets, religious organizations, and even your local hobby shop. These predictable, bounded structures act as "closed circuits" that serve as the foundation of human society, shaping how we live on a daily basis and guiding our expectations.

Much like a train schedule or a Sunday Mass, board games operate as their own kind of closed circuit: they are mechanisms constrained by specific rules designed to generate a unique experience.

The Ritual of the System

I still remember a friend laying out the cards and resource tokens for the game Splendor, explaining to the group that we were up-and-coming medieval jewelers. Our shared goal was to amass enough facilities to win the trust and attention of noble patrons.

Opening a board game box often feels like beginning something ritualistic. There is a wonderful, specific rhythm to shuffling decks, placing pieces, and drawing meeples. This tactile process helps players transition from the paradigm of the daily world into the self-contained engine of the game.

Now, as I spend my time analyzing and explaining Artificial Intelligence, I realize that AI models are built on incredibly similar principles. They are simply vast, digital "closed circuits." Instead of meeples, decks, and cardboard tokens, they operate using parameters, weights, and algorithms. Just as a board game's rules engine guides the flow of play, an AI's architecture governs its outputs and interactions.

Exercises in Empathy

In board gaming, the unique structures of play are intentionally designed to mirror social moments, simulating feelings of trust, responsibility, and survival. Playing these games involves distinct cultural events and processes of incorporation that help immerse the players in a different reality.

By sharing a different system of reality with its own unique flow of causality, gaming essentially becomes an exercise in empathy. It actively invites players into social situations they normally would not find themselves in.

This is exactly how we can approach our interactions with AI. Artificial Intelligence itself does not feel empathy, but it functions as a massive, computational mirror of our own humanity. The data these models train on is a sprawling compilation of human social moments, cultural events, and shared logic. When we prompt an AI, we are stepping into a new kind of closed circuit—one that reflects our collective humanity back to us.

There are some shared experiences that inevitably make people like each other, such as knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll (Sorry, my D&D nerd is showing). Whether we are navigating the mechanics of a tabletop game or exploring the complex capabilities of a new neural network, these structured, closed circuits allow us to tackle our modern "trolls" together. They aren't just engines of computation or play; they are frameworks that help us understand the world, and each other, a little better.

NOTE: This is a rewrite of my old Hobbies & Sheets article, which you can find here: Closed Circuits