Over the past couple of decades, the board game industry has exploded. Game-related stores, cafes, bars, and conventions have been popping up all over the world, and the game industry produced about $18 billion in revenue for 2022, a number that is expected to steadily rise.[1] Although this growth can be analyzed from many different angles, I’m most interested in the psychology behind what happens when we play. What is revealed about us as humans when we choose to spend an evening rolling dice and holding cards? Why, in an age of increasing digitalization, is there also an analog counterrevolution?
To begin exploring these questions, I’ll first turn to the insights of Jacques Lacan, an influential psychoanalytic theorist. He posits that reality for humans is constituted by three interlocking levels or registers: the real, imaginary, and symbolic. The imaginary and symbolic work together to provide the narrative and structure for how we understand the world to work and ourselves to be. Together, they can be said to constitute our conscious reality. The real, however, is what can’t be put into words, that which can’t be consciously thought. It pushes at us from the outside but remains unsymbolized, beyond our linguistic structures and thus external to that conscious reality. In this way, the real is always pressing in on worlds and only occasionally irrupting into our awareness. These irruptions feel like uncanny disturbances, leaving us unsettled and perturbed.[2]
Slavoj Žižek describes these registers using the metaphor of chess.[3] The rules of the game—how each piece is allowed to operate, capture, or move, for example—are part of the symbolic register that constitutes the structure and the relationships of the game. At the symbolic level, a rook could be called a tank, tower, or castle; what matters in this register is that it moves and interacts with other pieces in a particular way. The imaginary register for chess is that of medieval combat. Pawns are a shield wall protecting royalty, whereas knights charge in, attempting to capture the opponent’s king. However, this imaginary is also somewhat arbitrary. The same rules can (and have often been) applied to many different settings—Charlie Brown chess, for example, reimagines the game as Peanuts characters. Changing the imaginary but not the symbolic doesn’t inherently alter the essence of the game, as the rules and structure remain the same. The real of the game of chess, though, is that which is inherently beyond the world of the game. This includes the intelligence or skill of the humans engaged in the game, as well as what is happening around the players. The real is constantly pressing in, affecting the game, but it can’t be captured in the imaginary-symbolic registers. A bishop can’t appreciate his relationship to the grandmaster who moves him to put an opponent in check at a chess tournament. The knight in the game is always just a knight moving in a battle.
Playing off of Žižek’s example of chess, we can look at how other board games interact with the three registers, creating liminal spaces between their fantasy and our material world.[4] Designers and game critics will often speak of the interaction between theme and mechanics in a game. A game’s theme is its imaginary—the story, narrative, and pretend world of the game. For Monopoly, this is real estate; for Crescent Moon, it’s the Golden Age of Islam; and for Catan, it is settlers on a new island. But the mechanics of a game are the rules and structure that create the how for the players. The mechanics express the moves and interactions that are possible in the game. Dominion, for example, uses deck building mechanics in its theme of medieval fiefdoms, and the Undaunted series uses the very same mechanics (deck building) in its World War II–themed tactical war game. Both games are able to make use of the same mechanics while reimagining them in completely different stories. Z-Man Games’ use of the Pandemic System is another great example of game mechanics (the pandemic system) that have been reimplemented from their initial publication in the original Pandemic game to now many other themes—like Fall of Rome and Reign of Cthulu.[5] In other words, the theme, or imaginary, is a description of what the game is about and the mechanics are its how.
Well-designed games have a good synergy between their theme and mechanics. This both helps teach the game—making some rules seem less arbitrary and easier to learn—and also immerses players into the fantasy world of the game. Players experience a sense of being transported into the game when a strong theme pulls them in and connects easily with the mechanics. Having to return to a rule book or pause play to remember what a particular symbol means results in minor experiences of being jolted out of the narrative of the game and back into normal reality—like when someone interrupts or pauses a movie you are watching.
In this way, games are microcosms of our lives. In a game, we are engaged in what can be called a nested reality,an imaginary-symbolic world contained within our material reality. This nested reality provides meaning and purpose for our choices and existence within the world of the game. Although this is most explicit within role-playing games or RPGs, it is just as much a part of abstract games like Shobu or Go—only with a thinner imaginary and more robust symbolic register. So, too, in our material world we are engaged in our own imaginary-symbolic realities that provide directions for us as we navigate identity, agency, meaning, and community. What games threaten to expose for us, though, is that these realities are distinctly not the real. Just as the nested reality of a game is constantly affected by the real of the players and the world external to it, so too are we lost in our own imaginary-symbolic reality in which we are constantly being affected and moved by the real beyond us while also being unable to fully symbolize it. Games, thus, give us a chance to straddle two realities, inviting us to do the same with our material lives.[6]
Lacan’s three registers, the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real, can then be mapped onto the work of C. Thi Nguyen, a contemporary philosopher of games who describes two different ways of engaging in play. According to Nguyen, we can be engaged in achievement play, where we accept the totality of the ends of the game for our real ends, or striving play, where winning is valued as a disposable end. In achievement play, “Either one wants the win for its own sake, or for something that follows from winning.”[7] Like an Olympian competing for the gold medal or a professional gambler playing poker, the game is played for the sake of winning. Striving play, however, is when we engage in the play for its own sake. In striving play, the means and the ends become inverted as we take up an arbitrary end—getting the most victory points or conquering our opponents—so that we can engage in the very struggle for those ends. Winning, then, moves from being the end to being the means that facilitates our play, and playing moves from being the means of winning to becoming the very thing we are working to experience. So, in striving play, instead of playing to win, we try to win so that we can play.
Striving play requires that we take up a multiplicity of agendas. We must immerse ourselves in the game, trying to win while not being so disconnected from the aim of playing that we lose track of our deeper agenda, which is to enjoy the playing. The complexity of this position allows for a multiplicity of values to be present and interact with each other—like winning, maintaining friendships, caring for the other players, and fostering our own enjoyment. Conversely, when one is lost in achievement play, the real world beyond the game dissolves as winning takes on more and more significance and becomes a singular, simplifying focus. The sentiment that it’s just a game is lost from conscious thought as the game seems to consume the rest of our lives. When there is a collapse of the playful multiplicity of striving play into the singular value of victory, we are no longer able to maintain the complexity of committing to winning while recognizing its arbitrary nature. This can lead to the rewriting of an experience based entirely on the outcome, leading to behaviors like cheating and cutthroat aggression (among others). When winning takes on such importance, the story and experience of striving or playing becomes wholly contingent on the end result. Any enjoyment or pleasure from playing is either validated or erased based on whether or not one wins.
Connecting Nguyen’s work on striving and achievement play to Lacanian theory further allows us to explore our relationship to games and why we play. The Lacanian conceptualization of unconscious desire and the death drive integrates well into the striving play that Nguyen articulates. That is, according to Lacan, who is riffing on Sigmund Freud, there is something at work in humans that is beyond the pleasure principle. Although we think we are motivated by a conscious desire for a pleasurable outcome, closer inspection often reveals how we are actually getting in our own way and unconsciously preventing our own pleasure for the sake of enjoyment, or jouissance as Lacan called it.[8]
Lacan highlights the difference at work here between pleasure and enjoyment. On the one hand, pleasure is what Lacan might say is experienced when the object of desire is finally achieved. Pleasure is an exhale, a de-excitation that comes from having reached a goal. It’s the collapse after a run, the relief after a victory, or the sigh after a delicious meal. Note that it always comes at the conclusion of a buildup—pleasure feels good but is also depressive. It slows us down. Enjoyment, on the other hand, works to excite us. It is the buildup of excitation from the encounter with an obstacle or limit. Consider your internal state in the middle of a close board game or when you are working hard on something. When I write, I feel an energy pulse through me that can make it hard for me to sleep at night if I am in the middle of a project. Enjoyment is found in the encounter and transgression of a limit or an obstacle. Enjoyment gives us energy in the buildup, whereas pleasure is the release signaling the end of the experience. In this way pleasure and enjoyment require one another. Pleasure needs the buildup that moves us toward release, a buildup that creates enjoyment. Enjoyment, however, needs the fantasy of the release in order to slip past the censorship of consciousness; thus, pleasure is the necessary, fantasized alibi for the enjoyment.[9]
Lacan further differentiates between the object of desire and the aim of desire. The object of desire is the thing we think we want. It is the victory in a game or the acquisition of more money in the capitalist system. However, the aim of desire is to keep desiring. So, like the Wile E. Coyote who exists to try and kill the Road Runner—but never actually lets himself succeed—we place arbitrary objects of desire in our path, just out of reach, in order to keep desiring, to keep moving forward. The struggle toward something is the enjoyment that actually motivates us. The object of desire that brings about the fleeting pleasure is always illusory and arbitrary. We always want another iPhone, computer, car, gadget, or game as soon as we leave the store with the one we bought.[10]
If we map all of this onto Nguyen’s striving play, we can see how games are ways of prolonging enjoyment and interacting with something beyond. Remember that enjoyment is disruptive and pushes into a limit, but it also requires some pleasure as the fantasized end of the striving. We might also see how each of Nguyen’s forms of engaging play leads to a different form of pleasure. In other words, winning or losing means something different based on how you play. Achievement play leads to a masking pleasure that works to cover over the failure of winning, whereas earned pleasure results from striving play and embraces that failure.
Returning to the three registers—the real, imaginary, and symbolic—through this lens of striving play allows another aspect of games to become clear: how they thicken or thin our insulation from the real. As I have suggested, each game creates its own symbolic-imaginary reality through the theme and mechanics used, inviting players to inhabit that nested reality for the duration of the game. The real of it being just a game—and the complex humanity of each player—is kept at bay from this symbolic-imaginary reality, facilitating the competition or struggle for victory. In taking up the disposable end of winning, I can momentarily release the complexity of you as a whole human and instead invest fully in checkmating your king. The terms earned pleasure and masking pleasure provide ways to think about not just the quality but also the use or impact of the pleasure that is experienced. The key difference between the resulting pleasures stems from the way we interact with the multiplicity of nested realities that we have been describing; it stems from our posture to the real.
Someone who is engaged in striving play appreciates and enjoys (though not always consciously) the rules and barriers to their own victory. Instead of being detractors from the experience, the rules—or limits—act as obstacles that produce the enjoyment of the game. The game ends when the pleasure of victory is finally experienced by someone (or something, in the event of losing a cooperative game). A good game, then, keeps the fantasy of victory alive in the minds of the players—though just out of reach—throughout the whole game, allowing for greater and greater enjoyment. Games where one player is a clear winner from the beginning don’t facilitate the same level of enjoyment, as the fantasy of victory is already lost to the rest of the players. Additionally, the player who wins with no real challenge also doesn’t experience the same enjoyment, as that player doesn’t have to overcome barriers to achieve the victory. However, when one has engaged fully in striving play, fought through the barriers and obstacles of the game, and reached the end, the possibility of what I am calling earned pleasure comes into view—that is, a pleasure that is directly connected (but not equivalent) to the struggle of achieving it. Earned pleasure carries all the meaning and value of the work that was put into making it happen, so when that work was negligible, so too is the pleasure.
Earned pleasure also invites us into a disruptive liminal space between these nested realitiesor competing symbolic-imaginary worlds (i.e., the game world and our material world as humans playing a game). It comes just as the limitations of the game’s symbolic-imaginary reality are exposed, thereby inviting us to face something beyond. The false and illusory nature of a hard-won victory is revealed in the fleeting earned pleasure that it brings. The pleasure always fails to live up to the effort placed to achieve it. Consider how much harder it is to hold on to a victory than a defeat. We remember our losses because they feel more meaningful and stick with us in ways our wins never do.
We can reach for something beyond our reality only when we bring ourselves to the failure of that reality. Winning is pointless, and that’s the point. In Lacanian terms, striving play exposes us to the illusory nature of the object of desire (winning the game), inviting the real of our desire (to keep playing) to irrupt into our symbolic-imaginary. From striving play we come face-to-face with an earned pleasure and the realization that the struggle was the goal; the victory was just the arbitrary placeholder that facilitated our enjoyment. Importantly, one experiences this earned pleasure only after a good-faith investment in the game’s symbolic-imaginary (i.e., in the striving play). You have to take the game seriously and really work toward victory as the game posits it; otherwise, the victory doesn’t bring you to its point of failure.
Earned pleasure, thus takes one dangerously close to the edge of one’s reality by experiencing the full limit—and thereby the failure—of that symbolic-imaginary’s meaning-making potential. The nihilistic questions that may haunt us after a long game—like “what’s the point?” and “does any of this matter?”—can never be fully answered within the symbolic-imaginary of the game because that world is just a game. It isn’t real. These questions speak to a real that is beyond the game’s nested reality. In this way, the abyss of meaninglessness is confronted in the inevitable moment of the game’s symbolic-imaginary failure, just as the winner reflects on their victory and hears the dissatisfied voice that asks, “Is this it?” to the feelings and meaning that the hard-won victory now brings. The mismatch between one’s effort and one’s gain reveals both the absurdity of the object of desire (i.e., winning) and the value of exerting that effort. It is an irruption of the real, a liminal, absurd, contradictory space in which meaninglessness creates the possibility for meaningfulness. So earned pleasure thins our insulation from the real by helping us experience the failure of our symbolic-imaginary reality.
Conversely, masking pleasure—which is connected to achievement play—attempts to reify the existing symbolic-imaginary reality with a bad-faith illusion of unity. It tries to hide from the failure instead of moving toward it. This masking is seen, for example, in cheating, addictive or compulsive gaming, and escapism, as we work to feel whole and complete at the expense of truth—we deny the real of our complex and ambivalent self.[11] In Nguyen’s language, this is the “gamification of practical life”; it is when we reject the complexity of competing values for a certainty found in specific goals and objectives, and it can “lead to moral and social disaster.”[12] Masking pleasure, which tries to further obscure the real of the game, comes from the habit-forming practice of achievement play eroding the boundaries between the game and life so that our material world collapses into the simplicity of the game world. Complex values, like health and love, become reduced to measurable quantities, like weight or social media likes. By trying to game the system and focus solely on those measurable quantities, we lose our connection to the very struggle that produces the meaning for our goals. This is a retreat from the messiness and complexity of nuance. Masking pleasure thickens our insulation from irruptions by trying to maintain the pretense that there is no real—that it’s not just a game. In masking pleasure, winning is everything, as the game’s nested reality overtakes our material world.
Moreover, in achievement play, we take part in a dissociative process in which we are willing to jettison an aspect of our experience to achieve something. For example, in cheating, we deny a rule in order to move closer to a sense of victory and accomplishment, but because we have cheated, the victory holds even less value and meaning, and the cycle has to be continued. Or with the example of physical health, when one’s weight or BMI is taken as the measure of health, all manner of unhealthy choices and lifestyles can be used to achieve the desired number but at the cost of the very health it was meant to promote.[13] And when we take these steps, we not only cover up the hole of the disruption of our own enjoyment; we also try to cover over our past cheating. And in this way, the masking pleasure re-creates itself and increases the cost of the inevitable irruption of the real, leading to the compulsion to repeat in order to keep hiding.
In conclusion, putting together all these ideas around earned and masking pleasure, we can say that games present us with an opportunity for both the exploration of ourselves and our relationship with desire. In reflecting on what is pulled out of us through play, competition, cooperation, and imagination, we can see more of how we are—or are not—able to exist in the liminal space of play, straddling the nested realities of the game and our lives. We can become more curious about our affective responses to victory, defeat, hope, and loss, as well as what those responses say about our desires. Games help us grow curious about how we can be lured into nested realities or resist those invitations, how we hide from a real that pushes in or how we lean into those irruptions. Furthermore, games provide an opportunity for us to practice striving play and the embrace of an earned pleasure that exposes how quickly we are drawn toward the insulation of masking pleasure. They help us learn to further tolerate—and thus grow our capacity for—the enjoyment of the limit. Games teach us to remember that our object of desire is always illusory and unsatisfying, and they teach us to experience that dissatisfaction as the gift and beauty that it is.
[1] See “The Global Tabletop Games Market Size Is Expected to Grow at a CAGR of 11.82% from 2022 to 2028,” GlobeNewswire News Room, March 20, 2023, https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2023/03/20/2630590/0/en/The-global-tabletop-games-market-size-is-expected-to-grow-at-a-CAGR-of-11-82-from-2022-to-2028.html#:~:text=The%20board%20games%20type%20segment,a%20CAGR%20of%20over%2013%25. For more on the history and rise of board games, see Tristan Donovan, It’s All a Game: A Short History of Board Games (London, UK: Atlantic Books, 2019).
[2] For more on Lacanian theory, see Alexandre Leupin, Lacan Today: Psychoanalysis, Science, Religion (New York, NY: Other, 2004); Richard Boothby, Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2023); and Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
[3] See Žižek, How to Read Lacan (New York, NY: Norton, 2007).
[4] For more on board games and liminal spaces, see Paul Hoard and Paul Steinke, “Board Games as Liturgy: The Thin Space of Play,” in Christ and Cascadia (2023).
[5] See “The Pandemic System – More Than Just a Game,” Z-Man Games, January 18, 2024, https://www.zmangames.com/en/news/2021/7/26/pandemic-system-more-than-just-a-game/.
[6] More recently, some mental health practitioners have begun using role-playing games in therapy. See Kam Burns, “How Therapists Are Using Tabletop Games to Help People,” Wired, January 18, 2024, https://www.wired.com/story/therapists-dungeons-dragons-tabletop-games-helping-people/.
[7] See Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020), 5; and Nguyen, “Games and the Art of Agency,” Philosophical Review 128, no. 4 (2019): 423–62.
[8] For more on the death drive and Lacan’s reinterpretation of Freud’s theory, see Boothby, Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology after Lacan (New York, NY: Routledge, 2001); and Boothby, Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan’s Return to Freud (London, UK: Routledge, 2015).
[9] For Lacanian theory on enjoyment and pleasure, see Todd McGowan, Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2013); and Hoard and Tim Suttle, “Lacanian Virtue Ethics? Cultivating Virtue Through Failure,” The Other Journal 35 (2023), https://theotherjournal.com/2023/06/lacanian-virtue-ethics-cultivating-virtue-through-failure/.
[10] For the intersections and manipulation of the enjoyment system within contemporary, capitalistic American culture, see McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2016).
[11] For more on the split subject and ambivalent nature of human subjectivity, see Fink, The Lacanian Subject.
[12] Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art, 189.
[13] For more on the complexity of the gamification of life and formational impact of habit, see Adrian Hon, You’ve Been Played (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2022); Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art;and Hoard and Suttle, Lacanian Virtue Ethics?