What Do You Like About Playing Games?

Teachers, we also have a related lesson plan about teaching with seven New York Times games.

Online or in real life, alone or with others, on a road trip, in a backyard, around a table, or on a screen: What games do you most enjoy playing? Why?

Whether you listed chess, Minecraft, Monopoly, basketball, Call of Duty, Tetris, Dungeons & Dragons, charades, crosswords, tag or Wordle, when, where and with whom are you most likely to play?

How does playing games improve your life?

In 2020, Sam Von Ehren posed the question, Why do people love games?

He wrote:

As the Game Maker for The New York Times, I grapple with this question every day. The reductively easy answer is simple: They’re fun! But why are they fun? Do they have to be fun? As we dig deeper and deeper, we find more questions. What even is a game? What is fun? My take on the appeal of games is also simple, if paradoxical. Games are a controlled form of freedom. Our brains grab onto them because they are structures that exist to be avoided.

Games occupy a strange place in our cultural consciousness. Nearly everyone has played a game at some point in their lives. Despite that ubiquity, games are rarely discussed with the same reverence as other media like films or books. For most, games are like chocolate: a guilty pleasure consumed secretly. The game designer Sid Meier once remarked that “a game is a series of interesting choices.” Navigating these choices shapes the course of play, revealing who we are and how we think. Playing a game is an act of exposition.