Games and play are much older than human culture, as the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga pointed out. Animals did not wait for us to start playing. Playing games is among the most cherished and time-consuming human activities. But what is play, and what does it do?

The oldest board games we know are around 5,000 years old, about as old as writing. But while writing and reading were specialised skills for the few, board games were accessible to anyone who had some sticks or stones and some mud or sand. Games were international, even global, thousands of years ago, traveling along the trade routes between Asia and Europe and beyond. Since words are not needed for playing successfully, games could be played by anyone and between people from different cultures, as long as they agreed on the rules.

200 years ago, board games faced a huge revolution, as cheap paper and print made possible new kinds of games for the masses, with text and illustrations. Games went from simple, abstract spaces to complex worlds with characters, settings and sometimes stories. Much later, the digital computer changed games yet again, but in a curious interplay where games also strongly influenced the development of computing, and even digital culture as such. People will always play with new technologies, and new technologies are sometimes created through play.

This exhibition focuses on the core aspects of what games are, and what we think they do, and it will also puncture some myths and false beliefs about play. Are violent games making children violent? Will games lead to addiction? Are games in the classroom a better way to learn? What, if anything, can we learn from games? Can they make the world a better place?

The selection presented in this exhibition is meant to show the variety of play, from games where you do almost nothing (Calm Cast) to games where the point is to get lost (the VR labyrinths); from games we no longer know how to play (the ancient Egyptian favourite Senet), to games with a satirical message (Future? - No thanks!) and games where you can explore and reconfigure your own world (Build The Earth: Hong Kong in Minecraft). Is there a common point to all these games? No. But that is precisely the point. Some games are designed for the mind, some for the body. Some are potentially deadly, and some are mindless fun. Some are for solitude, and others for socialisation. Some are for learning, and some are for wasting time in a pleasant way. Some end in minutes, and some may never end.

What we today call games is a large design landscape of truly diverse phenomena, spanning many different materialities and technologies, social situations, purposes, topics and themes, player competences, distribution and business models, and physical interfaces, so that it seems unreasonable to capture them all under the one label of play, or games. Playing MiniMetro on a tablet in your favourite sofa chair is totally different from participating in a Live-Action Role-Playing Game (LARP) in the Nordic woods, which is again totally different from choosing between romantic virtual partners in a visual novel or Otome game, and vastly different again from witnessing a top-level eSport event in a packed arena of 80,000 spectators, or a similarly large but much more lethal spectacle 2,000 years ago in the Flavian Amphitheatre, also known as Rome’s Coliseum.

What is worse — Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that the category of games and play (German has the same word – Spiel – for both) cannot be formally defined, and in the decades since then numerous definition attempts have not proved him wrong. So, what is a game? Is it a kind of object, or a type of activity? The best answer is probably that a game is whatever someone thinks of as a game, and not primarily some other phenomenon. Then it is a game, for them. In that sense, war is not a game, love is not a game, since they are, for most of us, primarily something else, and then ‘game’ is just a metaphor.

We define games informally by pointing: this is a game; that is a game; and that may be the only thing they have in common. This exhibition is presenting many different games, used and remembered in many different ways, and the goal is to show some of the vastness of games’ design space. It is an endless topic, with an endless history, and with so many connections to so many other phenomena in the world. For researchers, it is the perfect interdisciplinary object; for parents, it is a babysitter and a potentially bad influence. It is both a free activity and a very expensive one, depending on what you play; games can be both totally innocent or very serious.

Are games fun? It is not fun to lose, so why do we tolerate activities that make us lose? Other forms of entertainment don’t do that. Perhaps the single most important thing games teach us is to lose – and to lose with dignity. And that the best strategy to win is to be patient – and to never give up.

Have fun!

Professor Espen Aarseth
 Curator, The Power of Play