A History of Games

Why We Play

In 1938, the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga published Homo Ludens, which translates as "Man the Player." His central argument was radical: play does not emerge from culture. Play precedes culture. It came before language, before law, before philosophy. "Games were a primary condition of the generation of human cultures." Civilization did not create games. Civilization grew up around them.¹

Eight decades of archaeology have confirmed the basic shape of that argument. The oldest carved gaming pieces found come from Basur Hoyuk in Turkey, dated to approximately 5,000 years ago.² Wherever archaeologists find complex societies, they find games with them.

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent the 1970s trying to answer why through observation rather than theory. He studied chess players, surgeons, musicians, and rock climbers, and found they all described the same inner state during deep engagement: a narrowing of attention to the present, loss of self-consciousness, distorted time, and a sense that the activity itself was its own reward. He called this "flow," and found it required three specific conditions: clear goals and measurable progress, immediate feedback on performance, and challenge calibrated to match the player's current skill level.³

Those three conditions describe the design of every successful game in this article, from Senet to Minecraft. The games change across five thousand years. The conditions they satisfy are constants.

Timeline at a Glance

The Oldest Games

Before the written record, before cities, humans were playing games. The evidence comes from objects rather than texts. At Skara Brae in Scotland, occupied from roughly 3100 to 2500 BCE, archaeologists found bone dice. At Mohenjo-daro in present-day Pakistan, terracotta dice from around 2500 BCE have been recovered with opposite faces that add up to seven: a mathematical convention identical to modern dice, established 4,500 years ago.⁴

The oldest dice were almost certainly not pure gaming objects. Animal knucklebones, called astragali, were used across ancient cultures as randomizing devices for divination. The same objects that predicted futures became tools for gambling and play. At Shahr-i Sokhta in Iran, dated to 2600 to 2400 BCE, archaeologists found the oldest complete and playable board game in existence: a 60-square board in a serpentine pattern, 60 pieces in two colors, and dice.⁵ Everything needed to play was present in a single burial. It was buried because someone valued it, possibly because someone could not imagine the afterlife without it.

Ancient Games

The four great ancient games that survive into the modern era tell different stories about why humans play.

Ancient Games at a Glance

Senet is the oldest game we can identify by name, first unambiguously depicted around 2620 BCE. It was played in Egypt for approximately 2,000 years. The board has 30 squares in three rows of ten; randomization came from four flat wooden sticks. The rules are lost: Senet ceased to be played during the Roman period, and the mechanics were never recorded precisely. By the New Kingdom (around 1550 to 1070 BCE), Senet had taken on explicit religious significance. Chapter 17 of the Book of the Dead depicts the deceased playing Senet alone against invisible opponents representing the forces of the underworld. The 30 squares represented stages of the afterlife. The pawns were the soul. Tutankhamun was buried with four Senet boards. A papyrus from around 1250 BCE shows a lion and a gazelle playing Senet at a table: satire that only works if the audience recognized what they were seeing.⁶

The Royal Game of Ur gives us the oldest written rules. A cuneiform tablet from around 177 BCE describes the game as a race, played with pyramid-shaped dice, with specific squares carrying spiritual messages from deities or ancestors. The boards themselves date to 2600 to 2400 BCE and have been found across Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Cyprus, and Crete. The most extraordinary fact is contemporary: Jewish communities in Kochi, India, were found in the 1950s still playing a game called "Aasha" whose structure matched the Royal Game of Ur closely enough to constitute the same game, transmitted continuously for approximately 4,500 years. It had been in unbroken play for longer than Christianity has existed.⁷

Mancala is not a single game but a family of over 800 documented variants: a board with rows of small cups, a pool of seeds or stones, and rules built around counting and redistribution. It is the most geographically widespread game family in the world. Enslaved Africans transported to the Americas through the trans-Atlantic slave trade carried mancala with them. They played it to build community under conditions designed to destroy community. The Warra variant was documented in Louisiana in the early twentieth century. A game rooted in African mathematical culture survived the Middle Passage and took root in a new continent.⁸

Go is played on a 19 by 19 grid with black and white stones. The rules fit on a single page. The game they produce is effectively infinite: the number of legal board positions in Go is approximately 2.1 times ten to the power of 170. The estimated number of atoms in the observable universe is around ten to the power of 80. Go contains more possible states than the square of all the atoms in the universe. This mathematical complexity is why Go resisted computer solution for decades after chess had been conquered. In March 2016, Google DeepMind's AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol four games to one. AlphaGo had not been taught Go: it taught itself through reinforcement learning, playing millions of games against itself until it developed strategies no human had ever conceived. A 2016 survey found over 46 million people worldwide who know how to play Go, with 1,300 years of unbroken professional practice in Japan.⁹

Competition and Commerce

The Ancient Olympics were first held in 776 BCE at Olympia in Greece, continuing every four years until 393 CE: over 1,100 years of quadrennial competition. The first thirteen Olympiads featured one event: the stadion footrace of roughly 200 meters. The program expanded to include wrestling, boxing, the pentathlon, chariot racing, and pankration. The games were not primarily athletic: they were religious. Olympia was a sacred site dedicated to Zeus, and winners received not money but an olive wreath. City-states provided lifelong subsidies to their champions. Up to 40,000 spectators attended at peak. The four-year interval, called an Olympiad, served as a unit of time measurement for Greek historians coordinating chronologies across different city-states.¹⁰

Chess began as chaturanga in northern India in the sixth or seventh century CE, representing the four branches of the Indian military: infantry (pawns), cavalry (knights), war elephants (bishops), and chariots (rooks). It crossed into Persia, where "Shah" became "check" and "Shah mat" (the king is helpless) became "checkmate." Arab scholars produced theoretical manuscripts on chess strategy before Europe had heard of the game. Chess reached Europe around 822 CE via Islamic Spain, and by 1200 CE was played throughout Britain and Scandinavia. The Lewis chessmen, carved from walrus ivory and found on the Isle of Lewis, date to the twelfth century. The modern rules crystallized around 1500 CE when the queen gained her current powers and pawns could advance two squares. On May 11, 1997, IBM's Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in a six-game match: the first time a machine defeated the best human practitioner of a complex strategic game in formal competition. Chess is played today by an estimated 600 million people worldwide.¹¹

Playing cards were invented in Tang Dynasty China (618 to 907 CE), made possible by woodblock printing. The earliest written reference dates to 868 CE. The standard 52-card deck in four suits reached Europe via Mamluk Egypt. Around 1480, French card makers simplified the suits into the modern form: clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades. The French system's simplicity reduced printing costs and became the world standard. One detail about playing cards has no parallel in the history of any other game: Nintendo was founded in 1889 in Kyoto specifically to produce Japanese playing cards. The company that would later create Mario and Zelda began by supplying gambling equipment to organized crime.¹²

Games went commercial in the industrial era. Edmund Hoyle published his treatise on Whist in 1742, a bestseller whose title gave the language the phrase "according to Hoyle." The Landlord's Game was patented in 1904 by Elizabeth Magie as a political education tool illustrating land taxation theory. Parker Brothers acquired the rights and published a modified version called Monopoly in 1935, removing the political content while leaving the mechanism Magie had designed to demonstrate how landlords extract wealth from renters. Monopoly remains the best-selling board game in the world by total copies sold. Magic: The Gathering, launched in 1993, created the collectible card game category and the first game to generate a financial market in its own components, with individual cards selling for tens of thousands of dollars.¹³

The Digital Revolution

The first video game patent was filed in 1947 by Thomas Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann for a cathode-ray tube device that was never commercially produced. In 1962, Spacewar! appeared on a DEC PDP-1 at MIT: two spaceships orbited a star, controlled by two players trying to destroy each other with torpedoes while managing fuel and avoiding the star's gravity. The game spread through universities as DEC delivered new machines. On October 19, 1972, Rolling Stone sponsored the first organized video game tournament in history, the "Intergalactic Spacewar! Olympics" at Stanford. Players competed for a year's subscription to the magazine. The event established the template for what would become esports: public competition, an audience, a prize, and a social identity built around demonstrated mastery.¹⁴

Nolan Bushnell had played Spacewar! as a technician in Utah. His adaptation for arcade play, Pong, was installed at Andy Capp's Tavern in Sunnyvale, California in August 1972. Two weeks later, the bar called to report a breakdown. When a technician opened the machine, the coin mechanism had jammed with quarters: it was earning an estimated $35 to $40 per day, four times the revenue of any other machine in the building. The technical failure was a commercial proof of concept.¹⁵

Digital Era Milestones

Space Invaders launched in Japan in July 1978. Designer Tomohiro Nishikado spent approximately one year in near-solitary development, writing the code and developing the custom hardware himself. By 1979, the game had earned $1 billion globally. For comparison, Star Wars, then the highest-grossing film in history, had earned $486 million. Space Invaders earned more than four times that from coin-operated machines alone. One of its most important features was unintentional: as aliens were destroyed, the processor ran faster because it had fewer objects to render, making the remaining aliens move faster. A hardware constraint became the central difficulty mechanic. The Atari 2600 home port quadrupled Atari 2600 sales: the first "killer app" in video game history.¹⁶

Pac-Man arrived in 1980. Designer Toru Iwatani was 24 years old at Namco, and his stated goal was to create a game appealing to women and families, not the young male audience that defined the arcade. Within one year, Pac-Man had sold 100,000 machines and grossed over $1 billion. By 1982, the estimated active US player base was 30 million per week. A 2009 Guinness record listed Pac-Man as the most recognizable video game character in the US, with a 94% recognition rate.¹⁷

The Atari crash of 1983 saw the US video game market fall from $3 billion to approximately $100 million in two years. Atari's release of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, programmed in approximately six weeks, produced 4 million cartridges and sold approximately 1.5 million. The surplus was buried in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico: dismissed as an urban legend for decades until a 2014 excavation confirmed it. Nintendo's recovery was deliberate: the hardware was redesigned to look like a toy, and a licensing agreement gave the platform owner control over all software through a hardware authentication chip. Unlicensed cartridges simply failed to run. This model is the foundation of every console business in operation today. By 1989, the US game market had recovered to $5 billion.¹⁸

Doom, released on December 10, 1993, attracted approximately 10,000 simultaneous download attempts within hours, crashing the distributing server. Within two years it had been installed on more computers worldwide than Windows 95. John Carmack designed Doom's file format explicitly to allow modification, and the first fan-made level editor appeared 47 days after release. Doom created the modern modding community. It also coined "deathmatch," establishing online multiplayer as a competitive practice distinct from cooperative play.¹⁹

Super Mario 64 (1996) was the first game to demonstrate that movement in 3D space could feel natural to a mass audience. The Nintendo 64's analog stick allowed 360-degree directional input with pressure-sensitive speed control. The independent camera allowed players to navigate 3D space while choosing what to look at. Every 3D game made since that uses a free camera owes that system directly to this design decision. Dan Houser of Rockstar Games said: "Anyone making 3D games who says they haven't borrowed from Mario or Zelda is lying."²⁰

World of Warcraft (2004) demonstrated that play could function as social infrastructure. Players formed guilds with internal hierarchies, shared schedules, and their own cultures. Relationships formed in the game extended into the physical world through friendships, marriages, and business partnerships. For some players, it was not an entertainment product. It was a place. In 2005, an in-game disease called "Corrupted Blood" escaped its intended dungeon through a coding bug and spread to populated cities. Epidemiologists studied it as a model for real-world disease spread. It has since been cited in academic papers on pandemic preparedness.²¹

Minecraft entered public alpha on May 17, 2009, built by one person: Markus Persson, a 29-year-old programmer in Stockholm. It sold 1 million copies before its official release and passed Tetris to become the best-selling game of all time, with total sales now exceeding 350 million copies. Microsoft acquired Persson's company for $2.5 billion in 2014. Minecraft established the early access funding model, in which players pay for unfinished software, and the user-generated marketplace, in which players sell content to other players through an official storefront. Minecraft Education Edition used the game's mechanics to teach computational thinking, with students building functional logic gates and circuits using in-game components.²²

The Science of Play

In 1975, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi published Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, his first major work on flow: the mental state of complete absorption in which a person is fully engaged, loses track of time, and experiences the activity as intrinsically rewarding. He found that humans can process approximately 110 bits of information per second. During flow, all 110 bits concentrate on the task at hand. This is why people in flow states cannot hold a conversation: they are using all available bandwidth.³

The phenomenon extends across every domain where humans operate at the edge of their ability. Formula 1 driver Ayrton Senna described a qualifying lap at Monaco in 1988 in terms that match Csikszentmihalyi's descriptions precisely: "I was driving it by a kind of instinct, only I was in a different dimension." He posted a lap 1.4 seconds faster than any driver had ever managed at that circuit. He was in flow at 200 kilometers per hour through the narrowest streets on the calendar.

Games are unusual among human activities in being explicitly designed to produce flow. Level designers calibrate difficulty. Enemy AI adjusts to player performance. Progression systems manage the challenge-to-skill ratio across dozens of hours of play. The craft of game design is, at its core, the craft of constructing and sustaining flow states.

The science Csikszentmihalyi published in 1975 describes what game designers had been doing intuitively since Senet. Clear goals: the soul navigates 30 squares to reach the afterlife. Immediate feedback: the sticks fall. Balanced challenge: your opponent plays with equal information and equal constraints. Csikszentmihalyi was careful to note that flow is not straightforwardly good. "Flow can become addictive," he wrote, "at which point the self becomes captive of a certain kind of order." The edge between productive engagement and compulsive avoidance is the edge that game designers have always been navigating, whether or not they had the vocabulary to name it.

Huizinga's claim in 1938, that play precedes culture, gains its full meaning here. Play is compelling because it produces a state that humans are wired to seek. The tools change. The state they produce is constant. Senet worked for the same reason Minecraft works: clear goals, immediate feedback, challenge calibrated to skill. Five thousand years of games, and one mechanism behind all of them.