At the turn of this century, I stood on the roof of a temple in Dendara Egypt. It was a hot and dusty day with the sun high over head. Reaching down for my canteen for a last sip of water I stopped and stood in amazement because there at my feet someone had carved a game board. I thought, wow three thousand years ago two people stood where I stood and thought to pass their time with a game. Thinking ahead twenty years what kind of games would I want to make, more importantly what kinds of games would I want to play?

Like Newton watching an apple fall, I became fascinated by the invisible pull emotions have on human actions. It soon became clear that emotions from player choices were the keys to fun and that video games used hundreds of rules to make a handful of emotions. If they were lucky. Whereas watching kids play, the full pantheon of human emotions emerge from a game with a single rule: Tag you’re it.

As I walked back to my boat on the Nile with this vision for 2020, I realized with a 20/20 hindsight that to create the games in my imagination everything we knew about how make, finance, and market games would have to change. It was then I decided to self-finance independent research on why people play games.

Egypt emotions inspiration origin video games xeo