Perhaps it’s the social and communal aspect of games, that we must all cooperate together to play by the same rules and respect the same values and stay with each other until the game is done, even if we are losing. Games bring us, and keep us, together – and the more people who know how to play a game, the bigger a community we become.
Perhaps it’s the architectural and mathematical elegance of games, the structure of their goals and rules and scoring that produce heightened ways of thinking and interacting that don’t happen in our normal daily lives. Games are structure, carefully designed structure, and structure is art.
Being exposed to these things – to freedom, to community, to art – is a transcendent good, a good that, as Sutton-Smith said, makes life worth living.The article itself is filled with examples of research that suggests that this is the case.
So I say, it's a good day to be a game designer. :-)
The full article is here:
https://www.bigquestionsonline.com/content/how-might-video-games-be-good-us
