Far from idle pursuits, games have transformed the way societies have made sense of life and death, order and conflict for centuries. Kelly Clancy picks five examples that reveal how playtime has often been a serious business
Games are among our most enduring cultural technologies. They persist, in part, because they’re a way for our brains to serve themselves pleasure for free. The Greek historian Herodotus, for instance, wrote about the Lydian people, who reportedly suffered an 18-year famine. He claimed they alternated between eating food one day and playing games the next – play, in other words, lessened the sting of hunger.
But games aren’t just fun: they are also essential education. Animals play to practise for the serious demands of adulthood: kittens chase yarn to drill hunting skills, for example, and young kangaroos rough-house to prepare to box their way up the social hierarchy as adults. With the invention of games, humans brought play into the realm of thought, because games exercise various mental functions.
Games are especially crucial for developing social skills. Plato believed they were the foundation of civic education, arguing that children who learned to follow game rules would grow up to be law-abiding citizens. And Plato wasn’t alone: scholars across history have lauded games for a range of educational virtues. As a result, people often endowed games with cultural principles they hoped to transmit to future generations. Games are messages from the past, and can reveal the values and beliefs of the people who play them.
Previous page CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: The black queen and king from the late 12th/early
13th-century Lewis chess set; a Mesoamerican ballgame player as shown in a sixth-century
relief; a board and pieces from the ancient game senet; and two dice, examples of
which pre-date recorded history
Passing into the afterlife
The ancient board game that carried players to the immortal realm
Senet – likely the ancestor of backgammon – is one of the world’s oldest known board games. It originated in ancient Egypt in around 3100 BC as mammoths still roamed Siberia’s Wrangel Island, hieroglyphic writing was jus
