Virginia Heffernan of the New York Times writes about the relationship between games, kids and life. Her take is precise but nuanced, and worth a quick read.

The piece identifies a conflict between games and life. A good game provides a controlled environment to its player – never too hard, never too easy – while life provides a tricky and chaotic environment life to its “player” – sometimes complex and confusing, sometimes silent and boring.

As game designers specifically interested in exercising certain thinking skills, we at Sifteo think about this a lot. How do the experiences we create challenge and entertain our players? How do those experiences transfer to other pursuits in life? How specifically do we need to identify those transfers?

Now, some games seem inherently worthwhile. We don’t worry too much about whether they are explicitly teaching us about topic A or life skill Z. Paradoxically, we may not question these games’ merit because we have an unstated, gut feel that they do in fact provide valuable lessons for life in general, even though we don’t always articulate them. Chess, crossword puzzles and sports would qualify.

Now if asked, we can fairly easily to come up with reasons why these games are good for you – they nurture planning and reasoning, or language and pattern matching, or discipline and teamwork.

As we at Sifteo build new-to-the-world games, we will work to point out these why’s explicitly, by identifying the skills we believe each game exercises. Our job, I think, is to continually work to make games that are truly great: great because they provide experiences that we know, at a gut level, exercise these skills – game that we implicitly know are worthwhile.