Oliver Roeder is a journalist in New York City. Recently, he has been a senior writer at FiveThirtyEight and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. Roeder holds a PhD in economics with a focus on game theory, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Economist, Slate, Nautilus, Aeon and elsewhere. Beyond the cultural and personal stories, Roeder explores why games, seemingly trivial pastimes, speak so deeply to the human soul. Funny, fascinating, and profound, Seven Games is a story of obsession, psychology, history, and how play makes us human. This interview includes the development of AIs in games, and classic games such as Go, Checkers (aka Draughts), Bridge, Poker, Chess, Backgammon, and Scrabble.