The key components of all games whether card games, board games, playground games or video games are universal: goals, rules, strategy, challenge and interaction.
What s even more interesting is that these components apply to all ages, which is one reason we have recently witnessed a glut of video games that were probably not designed with kids in mind but have, nonetheless, ended up becoming huge hits among that age group.
This trend of unintentional, intergenerational gaming has also been powered by advances in technology, especially internet access, and the introduction of new gaming formats. The mobile boom in the early noughties, for example, made games accessible for all ages, all the way from pre-schoolers up to grandparents. Then more new platforms arrived, including iPads, giving us access to gaming on the go with bigger screens, and online metaverses, which expanded the horizons massively when it came up multiplayer experiences.