A deep dive into play, performance and perception.
Introduction
From ancient coliseums to glowing screens, from chess boards to stock markets—humans have always been playing something. Whether it’s a show of strength, a test of wits, or a dance with chance, games aren’t just for fun anymore. They reflect culture, define status, create bonds, drive industries, and at times, hijack our minds. But what do all these “games” say about us?
In this piece, we roll the dice—six sides, six lenses, six ways to explore our love affair with play. Fitting, isn’t it? Even this essay can’t resist being a game.
⚀ Brawn Before Brain: The Origin of Sports
Long before we had smartphones or spreadsheets, we had sport. The earliest Olympic Games in ancient Greece, dating back to 776 BCE, weren’t just about winning; they were about honor, pride, and divine favor. Athletes competed nude (yes, really), showcasing not just their skill but their raw, unfiltered human potential. The goal? Glory—for oneself, for one’s city-state, and for the gods.
Sport was the original social media—crowds gathered, reputations were built, and legends were born in stadiums, not screens. That primal energy still pulses today, only now we wear jerseys and paint our faces. Soccer fans chant as though summoning ancient spirits. Cricket stadiums erupt with national pride. Baseball, America’s pastime, isn’t just about hits and strikes—it’s about nostalgia, hot dogs, and the roar of a home run under the summer sky.
The ancient Olympics were inspired from greek mythology and were as much a religious festivities as an athletic event | PC: google images
What ties all of it together is the sheer emotional gravity. One goal can send an entire nation into ecstasy—or despair. People cry, scream, hug strangers. Children idolize athletes. Adults relive their youth through team victories. In sport, we find identity, belonging, and a safe space to emote rage, rejoice, and release.
As the old saying goes: “It’s not just a game.” And of course, the counterpoint—“Try telling that to someone whose team just lost in the finals.”
Sports aren’t just about physical prowess—they’re about the soul of a society in motion.
⚁ Tabletop Tactics: Games, Bonds, and Boardroom Battles
If sports are the grand public theatre’s of human emotion, board games are the cozy living rooms of it. From ancient Mesopotamia’s Royal Game of Ur to modern-day Settlers of Catan marathons, board games have always offered something sports couldn’t—strategy over strength, quiet laughs over loud cheers, and the chance to win without breaking a sweat.
The evolution is fascinating. What began as spiritual or ritualistic tools—Senet in ancient Egypt was thought to guide souls through the afterlife—soon became clever, compact universes of their own. Chess, with its battlefield metaphors and slow-burn suspense, became the gold standard of intellectual warfare. Later came mass-market classics like Monopoly, Scrabble, and Clue, each offering a unique mix of luck, logic, and friendly sabotage.
PC: @Hive Cafe
Board games thrive on intimacy. They bring families together during holidays, spark rivalries between siblings, and turn awkward dinner parties into laughter-fueled competitions. There’s something inherently bonding about squabbling over rules, teaming up against a common threat, or accusing your best friend of being the traitor in Secret Hitler.
Emotions here are personal. There’s joy in winning, yes, but also in playing—a shared space to be silly, clever, or cunning. As the saying goes: “You can learn more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” (Socrates, allegedly—but definitely someone who lost at ‘Risk’ once.)
In a fast-paced world, board games remind us that sometimes, the best enjoyment is analog, tangible, and just a roll of the dice away.
⚂ Pixel Power: The Business of Play
Arcade games were once the digital heartbeat of village fairs—bright lights, loud sounds, and flashing “Insert Coin” signs that promised glory for a quarter. These machines took the carnival out of the dusty tent and plugged it into neon-lit rooms, replacing ring tosses and duck shoots with Pac-Man and Street Fighter. The same thrill, now pixelated.
What started as novelty soon morphed into a global juggernaut. As technology evolved, so did immersion. From blocky sprites to hyper-realistic graphics, from button-mashing to VR headsets—gaming didn’t just keep up with tech; it drove it. Today, the video game industry dwarfs Hollywood, with franchises like Call of Duty, Fortnite, and GTA generating billions, not just in game sales but in merchandise, microtransactions, and cultural dominance.
PC: google images
But here’s the kicker—video games don’t just entertain anymore. They occupy. Your time, your dopamine, your wallet. Mobile games buzz with push notifications. RPGs sprawl into hundred-hour epics. Multiplayer arenas demand daily check-ins. Attention has become the currency, and we’re spending it at alarming rates.
A telling anecdote? In 2010, a South Korean man reportedly died after a 50-hour gaming binge. The game? StarCraft. Cause of death? Exhaustion. It’s extreme, but it hints at a deeper reality—games are no longer just “play.” They’re architecture for addiction, routine, and sometimes, even identity.
The jarring part? Amidst all this hyper-engagement, we’ve lost slowness. The pause. The end screen. In gaming now, there is no “Game Over”—just “Next Match.”
⚃ The Gamble: Luck, Risk, and Ruin
Long before Wall Street bets or online poker apps, humans were already tossing bones and drawing lots. Gambling is as ancient as civilization itself—dice made from sheep knuckles have been found in archaeological digs dating back over 3,000 years. The thrill of chance, it seems, is baked into our DNA.
Gambling sits at a curious intersection of entertainment and existentialism. It teases the idea that luck—pure, unearned luck—can change everything. One spin, one card, one roll could be the difference between despair and delight. It’s intoxicating. It’s dangerous. And it’s everywhere: from casinos to cricket matches, from state lotteries to crypto memes.
PC: google images
The morality around gambling has always been a coin toss. In some cultures, it’s celebrated; in others, it’s sin. Religious texts warn against it, while governments often control it through national lotteries. The tension lies in its duality—both a harmless flutter and a potential ruin.
Here’s a fun fact: The term “jackpot” originated during 19th-century poker games where a player needed two jacks to open betting. No jacks? No pot. Today, it’s synonymous with sudden, massive gain—though the odds remain forever tilted.
Gambling forces us to confront something uncomfortable: we’re not in control. We’re spinning wheels in a world that rarely plays fair. And yet, knowing that, we still whisper, “Just one more bet.” Because maybe this time… chance will be kind.
⚄ Mental Moves: Strategy, Persuasion, and Gamification
Not all games are played on fields or boards—some unfold silently, in boardrooms, classrooms, and group chats. These are the games of the mind, where the most powerful moves are often invisible: persuasion, manipulation, anticipation. Welcome to the world of strategy and psychology.
Game theory—pioneered by mathematicians like John von Neumann and John Nash—studied how people make decisions when outcomes depend not just on their own choices, but on others’. It’s the logic behind poker bluffs, business negotiations, and international diplomacy. At its core, it asks: If I do this, what will you do? And more importantly, what do you think I think you’ll do?
PC: google images
Then came gamification. Suddenly, everything from fitness apps to employee portals borrowed from games—badges, levels, rewards—to keep us engaged. We’re being nudged, triggered, tracked. Not forced, just… incentivized. What looks like fun is often finely tuned behavioral engineering.
This obsession with influencing choices reflects something deep in the human psyche: we crave predictability—ours and others’. We want to feel in control, even as we’re being subtly played.
As Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow explains, much of our decision-making isn’t rational—it’s reflexive, intuitive, and easily swayed by context or cues we barely notice. Our brain’s two systems of thinking—fast (automatic) and slow (deliberate)—are constantly at odds, especially in environments designed to exploit the former.
Mind games reveal both brilliance and vulnerability. We’re master strategists—and remarkably easy to hack. All it takes is a well-placed badge, a little scarcity, or a leaderboard to make us dance.
⚅ Overplay: The Obsession with Winning
For something that supposedly builds character, losing in today’s world hits harder than ever. Once, games were a way to learn resilience—shake hands, bow your head, try again. But somewhere along the way, the spirit of play got overtaken by the cult of performance. Winning became everything. And losing? Well, that became synonymous with failure—not just in the game, but in life.
We’ve built a culture where identity is outsourced. We don’t just play the game—we become the outcome. Your score, your trophy, your follower count, your rank—these become proxies for your worth. And in chasing them, we slowly begin to disassociate from ourselves. We forget how to simply be without proving something. Without achieving. Without outperforming someone else.
Games, once tools for connection and self-discovery, now often feed a culture of comparison and chronic insufficiency. Society has gamified life itself—productivity apps, social metrics, even dating—and we’ve all taken the bait. We win to feel worthy. We lose and spiral.
As Marcus Aurelius once wrote, “It is not things themselves that disturb us, but our judgments about them.”
But try telling that to someone benched after years of training, or to a kid who internalizes second place as shame.
The irony? Games were supposed to teach us to bounce back. To get up, laugh it off, try again. But when one-upmanship replaces sportsmanship, the lesson warps. Instead of resilience, we cultivate rivalry. Instead of inner strength, we chase external validation.
And when that external validation dries up—as it inevitably does—we’re left staring at a scoreboard that no longer updates and a self we barely recognize.
The dark side of losing isn’t just the loss itself. It’s how deeply we’ve linked it to our sense of self. In a world obsessed with victory, sometimes the bravest thing you can do is lose… and still know who you are.
PC: google images
Conclusion: Beyond the Game
Games offer us entertainment, amusement, and a fleeting sense of enjoyment. They give us a place to belong, to compete, and to become something beyond our ordinary selves—whether through team sports or a quiet round of chess. They also offer predictability, structure, and a lens through which to interpret an often chaotic world outside.
A soccer match may be wild, but the field is marked. The rules are set. There’s a whistle to start and stop. Even gambling, steeped in randomness, follows a coded ritual.
Is that why we play? Is it the comfort of rules in disorder? The thrill of chance that temporarily liberates us from routine? Or perhaps it’s the illusion of control—of knowing the stakes, the players, the outcomes, even when life rarely grants us such clarity.
Maybe what we crave isn’t certainty or chaos, but the structured dance between the two. A controlled storm. Predictability dressed as unpredictability.
But, duality rarely leads to peace. We chase control with the same fervour as we chase the win. In pursuing victories, have we stopped asking what they cost? Time? Peace? Our inner sense of self? When play turns to pressure, the game stops being fun. It becomes performance.
Enjoyment, then, might be an illusion—not a break from life, but a mirror reflecting our desires and insecurities. It promises escape, yet often pulls us deeper into the very pressures we hoped to outrun—the need to be bigger than our mortal selves.
And still, games can offer a way back to who we are—if we let them. Not by always winning, but by learning when to stop playing. When to laugh. When to walk away. In that pause, that breath between moves, maybe we rediscover balance—and with it, a quieter, more rooted sense of self.
