Before humans could read or spend money, we played games.
Excavations in Mesopotamia and Egypt uncovered ancient games such as the Royal Game of Ur and Hounds and Jackals. With no inkling of an alphabet or the marketplace, people still sat across from each other with a board between them, rolling dice, moving tokens, following rules. It’s historical proof that channeling the competitive spirit into structured interaction with invented stakes is more than just a distraction. It’s a ritual foundational to the human experience.
About 5,000 years later, enter the networked digital device. Now that board could be anywhere and everywhere. The players too.
What’s in a game? Digital-game designers know the possibilities are almost endless. The canvas is the screen, where every pixel is programmable. The media are light and color, word and sound, movement and touch. The goal is to coax the deluge of information threatening to drown us every time we pick up our device into some pleasant and purposeful structure. To shape a digital experience that satisfies that ancient urge to play.
Here’s what I look for: an invitation to tinker toward an intuitive goal. Great games instantly tap into an instinct. To simplify, to organize, to connect. They harness that instinct into a concrete objective with a corresponding obstacle to create a sense of narrative harmony. The narrative is unified within a cohesive aesthetic, so every interaction feels purposeful within the whole.
The Atlantic has a legacy of intellectual and artistic leadership. With our new Games section, we are looking to channel that same spirit of excellence and inquiry towards where a daily ritual dissolves the mind into productively unproductive focus––the immaculate selflessness of the flow state.
Games are coherent systems of meaning. They’re a new form we’re figuring out in real time. And I hope you enjoy playing them even half as much as I enjoy thinking about them.
Caleb Madison
Games Director
