What do Senet, Backgammon, the Royal Game of Ur, Mancala, Go, Pong, archery, running, swimming, and boxing have in common? They are some of the world’s oldest games (tabletop, digital, and sports).

I realized recently that games wouldn’t have existed across the world for thousands of years if they weren’t solving an essential problem faced by humanity. Games let us feel something important that we rarely experience on a daily basis. We are able to work because of what we gain from playing.

Here’s a list I’ve compiled of essential feelings that games let us experience. Games enable us to feel:

• clever
• powerful
• creative
• lucky
• progress
• control
• safe
• joy
• adventurous
• discovery
• connection
• potential
• useful
• empathy
• masterful
• victorious
• acceptance
• complete
• unique
• purpose
• love

Think of a game you love and how it makes you feel. I put a photo of Tapestry here because it provides several of these essential feelings: I can feel clever when I eek out one more advance turn before a break for income. I can feel powerful when I expand my territory and ward off opponents. I can feel lucky when I roll the science die. I’m also consistently feeling a sense of progress (I’m always moving forward), control (full agency over the track I choose), and uniqueness (asymmetry).

Of course, the great thing is that no single game needs to provide all of these feelings. An adventurous or lucky game may not give me all that much control, just as a cooperative game that provides feelings of love and connection may not make me feel powerful or victorious.

Also, some of these feelings are provided by the act of gaming itself. I can feel complete in a game by maximizing a set collection mechanism, but I can also feel complete in the meta sense by collecting all expansions for a game I adore. I can feel useful by teaching a game, and I can feel masterful by honing my skills in a specific game over dozens of plays.

The more I thought about this topic, the more I realized two things:

1. These feelings are truly important in life. I need to sometimes feel lucky. I need to feel a sense of purpose. I need to feel like I’m making progress. Think about how essential (yet rare) these feelings are in our daily lives (work, family, school, etc). Life can be really hard, and there may be long spans of time when we don’t feel unique, discovery, or control. Games aren’t a replacement for those feelings in our daily lives, but they remind us that these feelings are possible.
2. We can create games with intention to evoke these feelings. On a purely theoretical level, I can look at any game we make and attribute at least a few of these feelings to it. I can also say that many of my games have an intended experience. But from now on, I plan to use these feelings as the foundation for every game’s design and development. Again, not every feeling for every game–some are contradictory–but I want our games to solve this problem with intention, not stumble into a solution.

I believe these are essential feelings to the human experience. While I truly hope that we all get to feel them in real life on a regular basis, I’m glad that games provide a consistent source of these feelings.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this concept. Am I missing any essential feelings? Do you consider these feelings essential to our humanity? What’s a game you played recently that provided a few of these?

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