Sure games are fun. Yet the play that's built into them does not make them false; it makes them psychologically truer even than everyday life. Games can solve major crises, train war heroes, and civilize us all. What the world needs is not less time for playing games but more.
ONE MORNING in the late 1980s, Richard Duke received a phone call he would later characterize as "somewhat amazing." The call came from the of[ice of the Secretary of Defense, at the behest of the man who had just been appointed Secretary. General Colin Powell was apparently finding himself stymied in his efforts to reorganize his new and notoriously complex department, in particular the coordination of the three service branch bureaucracies. Being an "old war simulation guy himself," he'd directed his staff to contact Duke, professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan, to help solve the problem. Duke knew exactly what the crisis required—playing a game.
At about the same time, coincidentally, I was spending my Wednesday nights sitting on a couch in a psychiatrist's office, trying, not to exorcise my demons, but to devise a board game based on the universe of therapy itself. I ended up on the couch because I was the only nonshrink in the room. At the time, our thinking was fairly linear: how to take certain hallmarks of the therapeutic process and reduce them to a game that would be entertaining and informative.
What we encountered, though, once our game—called Therapy, as it happens—was finished, were two remarkable things, both of which Colin Powell and Richard Duke might have told us. First, of all the professions, psychiatrists and psychologists tended to do worst at the game; secondly, the synthetic process worked even better in reverse. Playing the game expanded people's grasp of human nature in general and their particular group's dynamics. But even more, watching people play revealed a depth of information about them, and about the world at large, that you would ordinarily expect only from months of official therapy.
The more we became immersed in the world of games, the more we realized that games weren't simply revealing and therapeutic by nature; they were terrific tools for informing people about themselves, for getting them back in touch with the world of pure play and even for civilizing them. The idea was remarkable: 25 bucks and a Monopoly game might tell people as much about their own emotional truths as 25 hours on the couch, or 25 volumes of Shakespeare.
'Just' a Game?
In fact, the phrase "just a game" is a masterpiece of cognitive dissonance. Games are anything but "just" anything. They cover the gamut of human endeavor and come in every package and medium you can imagine. Last year in the United States alone, 126 million board-style games were sold for $1.14 billion; video and computer games accounted for another 55 billion. It is impossible to calculate how much people benefit from games:
o Games are primers on turntaking, the basis of all relationships.
o They can solve major crises in industry and teach people not to pilfer pencils from the company storeroom; in fact, companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on them for that.
o They can be training grounds for legendary generals and make the difference between winning and losing wars.
o Finally, and most important, games can reopen doors into the world of pretending and childhood, reminding us of unadulterated fun, sparking creativity.
Psychologically speaking, games have a knack for setting us free.
People have been playing games at least since recorded history. The earliest form of games involved a combination of entertainment via gambling (the words "game" and "gambling" share the same Anglo-Saxon root) and practical divination; primitive games were the ancient equivalent of the TV phone-in psychic show. In Assyria in the 12th century B.C., the knuckle bones of animals were the forerunners of dice used for wagering money as well as allocating inheritances and--a possible pointer for modern times--the election of public officials. An Etruscan vase from the same period shows Ajax and Achilles playing a board game during the Trojan War, both for recreation and to divine the whims of the gods. Even the precursor of chess, a Mesopotamian game called "shah" (meaning "king"), was employed to forecast how the reigning monarch would do in battles.
The Good Stress
From the beginning, games were indispensable for revealing secrets. What separates early games from the modern pantheon of games we love to play (and lose the pieces to) is the direction of revelation. Ancient games tried to plumb the secrets of the world outside; modern games can be eerie at disclosing the mysteries within.
If there's a deep template for language in our brains, there seems to be one for games, too. Where does this come from? And why do we show parts of ourselves playing Sorry we'd be sorry for revealing in any other activity?
Every game is a social world unto itself. What every great game does is take the bad stress of socializing out of the social situation, while leaving the good stress, the frisson of competition, in. Games do this by providing stress-reduced settings for socializing we usually play with friendly people, at a time of day when there's less outside pressure that might be inhibiting--and by imposing a structure or protocol on the interaction to take place, a structure that removes the often-paralyzing onus of social improvisation from the players.
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