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.

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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, 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.

Senet, ancient Egypt

The ancient board game that served as a map for players to pass to the afterlife

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 just emerging, and camels were first being domesticated.

Senet means ‘passing’, possibly referring to the game’s race-like mechanic: players vied to be the first to move all their pieces across the board by casting sticks or knuckle bones. In the earliest known record of trash talk, a senet player depicted in the tomb of Pepyankh in Egypt brags: “You speak as one weak of tongue, for passing is mine.”

Though its origins were secular, senet came, over time, to serve as a map for the soul’s journey after death. It makes several appearances in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a collection of magic spells inscribed inside coffins to help souls successfully navigate the netherworld.

Certain squares on the board became associated with landmarks and obstacles in the afterlife. Landing on square 27, denoted with the hieroglyphic for the ‘waters of chaos’, sent players back to 15, ‘the house of rebirth’. Before exiting the board, pieces had to land on 26, ‘the house of happiness’ – the mummification chamber.

Mummification was thought to help souls recognise their corpses, the doorway to the afterlife. Although it was prohibitively expensive for many Egyptians, personal senet boards, found buried in many graves, were another way a soul might recognise its former body. As such, senet democratised access to the immortal realm, serving as an accessible map of life after death.

The Mesoamerican ballgame, the Americas

A dangerous, sometimes fatal, ball game that may have helped rulers avoid conflict

More of a family of games than an individual sport, the Mesoamerican ballgame – as it’s widely known – likely arose around 3,700 years ago in what’s now Mexico. It remained vital for millennia among the Olmec, Maya and Aztec people. Some experts suggest it helped maintain and cohere those cultures because they used it as a proxy for war.

Players from opposing teams worked to keep a heavy rubber ball in the air, sometimes using sticks but most often using their hips. Points were scored by bringing the ball to the opposite end of the court, and lost if it hit the ground twice before it could be returned to the other team. A player automatically won the game for their team if they put the ball through one of the prohibitively tall hoops that lined the court.

The ball weighed up to four kilograms, so players were frequently bruised and bloodied despite wearing heavy padding. Spanish accounts note players dying after the ball hit them in the head or stomach. Injuries weren’t the only danger: in some cases, play involved ritual sacrifice, and losing teams were decapitated.

In the Mayan creation myth Popul Vuh, human heroes play against the gods of the underworld, signifying the battle between life and death. However, the game had more than symbolic significance. Players were often important political figures, and their gaming victories may have legitimised their rise to power. Ancient Olmec art is best known for its colossal basalt heads, which are thought to be portraits of kings equipped in the regalia of ball players.

Remarkably, the game may have been partly responsible for the rise and maintenance of these complex societies because it offered leaders a more peaceful way to settle disputes than costly and destructive wars. Ball courts were particularly prevalent in hotly contested areas with many border disputes.

Other pre-Columbian American games, like chunkey and lacrosse, are also thought to have been peaceful ways to resolve conflicts. Indeed, some scholars argue that lacrosse was vital for maintaining peace among the Six Nations of the Iroquois.

Chess, India

An Indian stroke of genius honed the minds of medieval princes and early computers alike

Chess is the most popular board game in history, originating in sixth-century India as a battle simulation game. In its earliest incarnation, it was known as chaturanga, or ‘four-limbed’, referring to four ancient divisions of the Indian army: infantry, cavalry, elephantry and chariotry.

As the game percolated west, these pieces became the pawns, knights, bishops, and rooks familiar to European players. What was once a vizier piece came to be replaced by a more dynamic queen, influenced by the rise of powerful queens in Europe. Persian players would exclaim Shāh Māt (‘the king is helpless’), which, adopted into English, became ‘checkmate’.

Chess is the first known game in which different pieces possess different powers, like the military regiments on which they were modelled. Writers have long celebrated chess for honing its players’ strategic skills and clarifying their thinking.

The game featured heavily in ‘mirrors for princes’, a genre of books on manners popular in India, Persia and Europe throughout the Middle Ages. Playing chess was like looking into a mirror, revealing players’ strengths and weaknesses to themselves. The 10th-century Abbasid scholar al-Masudi detailed how chess was used to train military strategy and mathematics.

In fact, chess is so heavily associated with intellect that early computer pioneers took it up as a training ground for developing artificial intelligence. In 1950, Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, claimed that chess was an ideal problem for computers because it was discrete, and “generally considered to require ‘thinking’ for skilful play”. In their quest to teach machines to play chess and other games, researchers pioneered countless computing innovations and laid the groundwork for the striking capabilities of today’s machine learning systems.

The philosopher’s game, Europe

The medieval mathematical board game that reflected shifting views of the universe

Beginning around the 11th century, rithmomachia, or ‘the philosopher’s game’, became central to higher education in Europe. The game was thought to represent, in aesthetic form, the formal number theory of Greek polymath Pythagoras.

It was a favourite pastime of monks, because church leaders believed it had an enlightening quality. Ovid hailed it as “the leaf, flower and fruit of Arithmetic, and its glory, laud and honour”. Thomas More had the virtuous citizens of his 16th-century book Utopia play the edifying game of rithmomachia instead of morally corrosive games such as dice.

Rithmomachia is similar to chess, and its different pieces move according to distinct rules. Like chess, players vie to capture opponent’s pieces. Unlike chess, each rithmomachia piece is inscribed with a number that dictates where and how pieces must be positioned to capture other pieces. For a ‘proper’ victory, the winner must arrange several of their pieces on their opponent’s side of the board in a mathematical progression – 2-4-8, for example.

Pythagoras, who founded a mathematics cult that held a grip on European scholarship for more than a thousand years, proclaimed that “all is number”. Unfortunately, Pythagoras did not believe in all numbers: he instead held that rational numbers – whole numbers such as 1, 2, 3, and simple fractions such as 1/2 – were the foundation of the universe.

His cult so esteemed rational numbers that they tried to cover up the existence of irrational numbers (non-repeating decimals, including pi) – reportedly assassinating the Greek philosopher Hippasus, who had stumbled on their existence.

This myopic focus on rational numbers set back European scholarship by hundreds of years. Yet by the 17th century, new techniques borrowed from India and Persia had reinvigorated European mathematics, and rithmomachia’s popularity waned as Pythagoras’s ideas fell out of favour.

Kriegsspiel, Europe

The war games that allowed strategists to devise miniature melees to plot a conflict’s outcome

Kriegsspiel, or ‘war game’, changed the face of modern Europe. Starting in the 18th century, German military strategists tinkered with chess – which was itself an abstraction of war – to create a more realistic military planning tool. Inspired by the success of the scientific method in so many other fields at the time, they hoped to recast war as a science.

Using the game they devised, Kriegsspiel, new strategies could be tested and workshopped. Designers first expanded the chess board to thousands of squares, colour-coded to represent different terrains. Eventually, as map-making technology improved, the game was played on scaled maps of actual battlefields, which allowed officers to plan their real campaigns in minute detail.

Each turn represented two minutes of warfare, and wooden block troops were constrained to move a realistic distance in that time. Umpires consulted casualty tables based on actual battle data to predict each simulated action’s effects. Dice throws randomised the damage from each ersatz attack. The result was a remarkably accurate prediction engine, which German officers used to cohere the first German empire in the late 19th century.

General Karl Kraft, one of the most eminent strategists of that era, wrote: “The ability to quickly arrive at decisions and the cheerful assumption of responsibility which characterised our officers in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 was in no small measure due to the war games.”

General Helmuth von Moltke, meanwhile, used Kriegsspiel to rethink traditional wisdom, too: its bird’s-eye view, for instance, inspired him to abandon column-and-line troop formations, which made soldiers easy targets, in favour of unstructured formations. Today, most major militaries still use some form of game simulation in their training and planning.

The pacifist writer HG Wells published a simple tabletop war game, called Little Wars, in 1913 in the hope that playing at war and witnessing its horrors in miniature would inoculate people against it. Little Wars gave rise to a new family of tabletop war games, eventually evolving into Dungeons and Dragons and countless popular role-playing video games.

War games have also informed modern policy. Every outcome of Proud Prophet, a nuclear war simulation game played by top US officials in 1983, was so harrowing that the exercise convinced the Ronald Reagan administration to open arms control negotiations with the Soviets.

Kelly Clancy is a neuroscientist, physicist and author of Playing with Reality: How Games Shape Our World (Allen Lane, 2024)

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This article was first published in the July 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine

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