Good Games are not a Waste of Time

It should be noted that children's games are not merely games. One should regard them as their most serious activities.

Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

In 1984, I began teaching via games and simulations. I always encouraged adult students to look at games as reflecting back to what they know, and what they needed to learn. Most importantly, a game reflects back on one's behavior. It's an instant feedback system. Instead of the teacher lecturing you, the game is feeding back a personalized lecture, custom made just for you.

Robert T. Kiyosaki

Play is supposed to be the opposite of work, but most video games are just jobs with a little bit of fun thrown in. These games can leave players feeling abused, frustrated, and overly aggressive. What your players need is freedom from competition and aggravation. Give your players a place to play where they don't have to win anything. Let them have fun without having to follow a bunch of rules. Give your players a chance to overcome challenges that have many solutions. Your game can either irritate or alleviate. Which would you rather do? If you want to add to the happiness of your players, give them freedom.

Duane Alan Hahn

To me games have an extremely great and still unrealized potential to influence man. I want to bring joy and excitement to people's lives in my games, while at the same time communicate aspects of this journey of life we are all going through. Games have a larger potential for this than linear movies or any other form of media.

Philip Price from a Halcyon Days interview

Fun is not a fatuous activity. Fun is the meter on your emotional state. Fun takes on an important role as an indispensable part of our lives. It's a characteristic of intelligent species to engage in activities for which there seems to be no reward. As a culture, we class those activities as play. Those are things that don't have any extrinsic reward. The reward is all intrinsic.

As intelligence rises, the need for stimulation also rises. For every brain, there is an optimum level of arousal that your brain wants to get to. If your brain doesn't reach that level during the day, you've got to play.

By consuming your daily quota of stimulation, you promote your psychological and spiritual growth. You can also expand your intellectual capacity. Some things have a certain amount of depth that pushes you, makes you think a little deeper than you have, makes you study a little more, makes you connect with things outside of the game environment.

When you become completely absorbed by a game that pushes you to your intellectual edges, you feel like what you've done is more deeply significant than what you would have done otherwise.

Good games are good for you. Fun is a vitamin for the mind, essential nourishment for your intellect.

Dan Bunten with Heidi E. H. Aycock (adapted)

Compute Magazine, January 1992