Quantum games could teach quantum rules—and maybe more

From Quantris, a quantum spin on Tetris, to IBM-powered horror levels and quantum versions of chess and tic-tac-toe, a growing wave of “quantum games” is using playful mechanics to make superposition and entanglement feel intuitive. Yet most of today’s experim

The blocks keep falling—until one weird shape makes the rules feel wrong.

In Quantris. the quantum version of Tetris. a pale yellow square lands awkwardly on a green block shaped like the letter “z”. Nearby, a strange block has a white border that seems to confine only empty space. In the game’s instructions. that shape is in a quantum state of superposition: an odd mix of existing and not existing. right there on the screen.

To proceed, you’re told to observe it. A tiny black square marked with an eye drops from the “video game sky” and hits the there-and-not-there block. After it’s observed, it blinks into existence—at exactly the moment your stack is perilously close to the ceiling. There was an equal chance that the observation would annihilate the block, finding it non-existent after all. You lose at Quantris anyway, and even quantum mechanics can’t save you from being bad at video games.

Quantris is a small, playful stage for a big idea: can video games help people better understand quantum mechanics? The answer, so far, is a mix of enthusiasm and hard constraints.

Quantum games have been floating around for years. Quantum physics and related phenomena appeared in video games as early as the 1980s. But the number of games built directly on quantum laws—or made with quantum devices—jumped after quantum computers became accessible through the cloud in 2016.

Laura Piispanen at Aalto University in Finland, who researches quantum games, estimates that the number of quantum games is close to 400. Many of them were developed during weekend-long Quantum Game Jam events that have been running since 2014.

One of Piispanen’s favorites. Qubit the Barbarian. takes inspiration from early quantum games and leans into a decidedly vintage look. Players move through a maze made of tiles that correspond to quantum states. The player can use quantum mechanics to change those tiles—measuring properties of a quantum state changes a tile. either clearing new paths or building new walls in the maze.

Researchers and gamers are convinced there’s a lasting future here, but not because quantum games are simply “fun demos” of physics. The more urgent question is what happens when people learn by playing, using tools that feel intuitive even when the underlying science is not.

That possibility depends on what today’s quantum hardware can actually do.

For now, quantum games are largely not played directly on quantum computers. Even as quantum computers improve quickly. they remain experimental devices. only now reaching a level of computational power and reliability that could let them tackle scientific problems that are otherwise intractable. But even in optimistic futures, researchers expect quantum computers to excel at only a few specific tasks.

Running a game in real time is not yet one of them.

Still, quantumness is already finding its way into game development itself. Earlier this year. Moth Quantum released Quantum Backrooms. a horror game whose levels are generated by an IBM quantum computer during development. It’s set in a landscape of rooms within the universe of Backrooms. an internet phenomenon centered on eerie. liminal spaces. which was recently adapted into a critically acclaimed film.

James Wootton at Moth Quantum said that because each room corresponds to the quantum state of a different part of the quantum computer, the result feels like being stuck inside the device.

Wootton’s approach is one path. Julian Togelius at New York University—who studies creativity. video games and artificial intelligence—points to another gap: in some games. the player can interact with the environment locally. without the outcome of their actions depending on the rest of the game’s world. Making game worlds more connected and realistic is hard. Togelius says. and quantum computers could potentially help because the problem boils down to a mathematical challenge with many constraints and conditions.

But he also warned that this idea is more complex than what has been done in quantum games so far, in part because quantum hardware is still imperfect and limited.

Even in Quantum Backrooms, quantumness stays with the development pipeline. The player encounters quantumness after the IBM quantum computer has been turned off, and a conventional computer takes over.

Running games directly on quantum computers isn’t impossible. Wootton coded a quantum version of rock-paper-scissors on one of the earliest IBM quantum computers in 2017. But many quantum games, including those by Quantum Native, still run on conventional computers that simulate quantum computers.

Chris Cantwell at Quantum Native. who developed Quantum Chess and several other games. said: “Right now. all of my games still run on their own simulators. Hardware is not quite there yet.” In 2020. one of Google’s quantum computers ran a few rounds of Quantum Chess. but Cantwell said it required him to completely recode his original program for the game.

For games to become truly quantum. Cantwell’s view is that developers need to incorporate quantum functions into gameplay—functions that are based on the quantumness of the hardware. That’s also why van Nieuwenburg believes quantum games could eventually serve as benchmarks for a quantum computer’s performance.

Evert van Nieuwenburg at Leiden University in the Netherlands developed Quantum TiqTaqToe. a quantum version of naughts and crosses—tic-tac-toe if you’re in the US. In his approach. players can use superposition and entanglement as extra moves in familiar games: in Quantum Chess. for example. a piece can be in a superposition of two positions on the chessboard; in TiqTaqToe. a player can entangle pieces. Van Nieuwenburg says players don’t need to understand the deep meaning of these phenomena to use them—they can try them out.

That try-it-out quality might be the most important reason quantum games matter outside the lab.

Quantum physics often feels counterintuitive at first because daily life doesn’t involve interacting with quantum phenomena. They’re usually reserved for tiny particles and extremely cold objects. Games can change that by giving people a way to experiment with rules that would otherwise stay distant.

Van Nieuwenburg told a story that still lands even when you know he’s talking about mechanics: “I will never forget this. We went to a science night [at a school] and there was a group of three kids. they were probably six or seven. They were playing TiqTaqToe. I don’t think they really knew exactly what they were doing in the first moment. but then after a minute. one of the kids started yelling. ‘Oh no. you entangled me!’”.

He laughed as he added that it doesn’t take much for kids to get comfortable with new slang—even jargon from quantum physics textbooks.

Cantwell echoed that perspective through his own family. “My eight-year-old likes playing Quantum Chess better than chess because he can make more pieces. He doesn’t understand the quantum at all… but his brain is interacting with genuine quantum phenomena.”

For researchers focused on developing quantum technologies, the argument becomes personal. If childhood quantum gamers can learn the language of superposition and entanglement through play, they could grow into quantum-native software developers.

That outreach angle is also part of why Spiros Michalakis at the California Institute of Technology has spent years working on quantum games. Michalakis worked on Quantris. Quantum Chess and several other games. and his involvement started in 2014 when he made a quantum modification for the popular video game Minecraft. He said it “spun out into a whole new area of research.”.

He described what he’s been trying to do for 12 years plus: not simply build games that have some quantum backend. but games people genuinely want to play. “The thing that I’ve been trying to work on for 12 years plus now is to not just build games that have some quantum backend. but games that somebody wants to play. right?. The games that have game mechanics that allow someone to say. ‘Wow. I can make new strategic decisions in the game. with new tools. new weapons. new relationship to enemies’. ” he said. He called that a much harder problem than generating game levels.

Togelius made the same point from the other side of the design challenge. Clever solutions—ones that rely on quantum superpositions or entanglement—can be invisible to players if the gameplay isn’t engaging enough. “It’s similar to how if you play a game where the goal is to shoot enemies. it doesn’t matter whether they can recite Shakespeare. he says. The cleverness, quantum or not, must be engaging and useful.”.

He summed up the difficulty bluntly: “Making a game in itself is kind of easy, but making a game that takes off is super hard.”

Even with all the promise, he remains sceptical about whether quantum computing will be the next big thing in games.

The tension between hype and reality shows up in the core mismatch between quantum potential and game expectations. Games demand real-time responsiveness and reliability; quantum computers, for all their progress, still fall short of being the everyday engines behind mainstream gameplay.

In the meantime, the work continues in the spaces quantum can reach right now: as tools used during development, as simulators running on conventional computers, as interfaces that let people touch abstract rules through familiar play.

For Michalakis, Togelius, van Nieuwenburg and others involved, the goal is not only to explore quantum mechanics. It’s also to make sure the people encountering it—especially kids—want to come back for another round.

quantum games superposition entanglement IBM quantum quantum chess Quantum TiqTaqToe Quantris Quantum Backrooms outreach Aalto University Leiden University artificial intelligence