The direction that is feeling most fruitful to me in answering this question is to ask: what has been the historical relationship between games and money?
Moriarty naturally focused on the exceptions like chess, but the word “gaming” used to mean gambling (and it’s still used as a euphemism by the gambling industry). This neatly explains the atmosphere of social disapproval surrounding it, but the real interesting question is why were gambling-style games overwhelmingly the most popular and are now only one genre among many. I go back for this to what I said earlier:
Without technology (and I would also point out that modern tabletop games are built on cheap mass manufacturing of boards, pieces, as well as arguably the “technology of mass education” for the audience to be sufficiently comfortable with abstractions), games are limited in the complexity they can achieve and need to remain very simple. Simple loops not tied to anything else fail to create the illusion of meaning that is essential to the enjoyment of games.
Gambling provides a solution: a connection from the game directly back to the metagame of accumulating money in life, infusing a powerful shot of meaning in every otherwise futile and tedious round. There are only a very few games which were able to introduce “whirls” of meaning internal to the game within premodern constraints: Go is the shining example, and I’m not sure what the Chinese tradition of thought has to say about it.
Money continues to inform how we enjoy and culturally value games today:
Arcade games, their game loops more nested than gambling, but still relatively repetitive, were founded on the player’s motivation to maximize value-per-quarter. I’ve discovered that when I play arcade games in emulator today, they only come to life if I set for myself an arbitrary coin limit before restarting or taking a break – if I’m not good enough for 1 credit, 5 is often a good starting point.
Free-to-play games have a complex relationship with gambling – the “house” profits like in conventional gambling, but instead of your success or failure in the game leading back to success or failure in “real life”, the flow of meaning is inverted: the rich in real life (or the spendthrift) can perform better in the game, while the poor or frugal can take extra pride in the skills they use to match the rich despite their handicap. Cultural arbiters devalue this style of game even as they’re extremely popular, reproducing the usual historical situation of games.
Money also informs how we culturally value games when we adopt the capitalistic “time is money”. The early-2000s moral panic about MMOs was about students who devoted extraordinary amounts of time to their game of choice, as opposed to their education: in other words, the accumulation of “human capital”. In general when we are hard on ourselves for wasting time playing worthless games, what may sometimes be going on is that we value time that way because we could’ve spent it earning money.
The link of capital to games is strong and your case studies here are clear evidence of that. The appeal of monetary reward in gambling is undeniable. I think the capital is likely standing in for something else that might also help point to the meaning inherent in [playing] games.
Ludo/Parcheesi/Sorry (and its many variations) is a good example of a board game which is mostly luck but actually reveals a lot about its value depending on the cultural context it is played in. It is still a popular game in some parts of the world (particularly when money is involved) because the element of luck and skill link to popular beliefs and assumptions about fate. It’s thrilling to win money and it may even be the point of playing (especially for the professional gambler). However, in the case of gambling fallacies and strong beliefs we can see how one might influence their own luck through ritual, massaging their fate or mixing luck and skill. In this way, the practice of apparently very basic or highly luck-based games still holds a cosmic meaning relating to a direct experience of one’s will and how it helps them understand fate.
This is not to say that every gambler is on some journey of self-discovery to understand their place in the universe but I think gambling often goes beyond capital. The various monetisation models that sprang up around tradeable card games and videogames are an extension of this and relates them back to discussing meaningful expenditure of our time. Time is exchangeable with capital to a degree and I imagine a similar connection can be made to absurdism when one considers how capital is little more than a token that still imposes huge importance on our day-to-day living. A similar connection can be made to skill (meritocratic, fair, earned) and luck (absurd, chaotic, unearned/given).
A deeper dive into philosophical thought concerning a single game would likely help with these questions about how the game comes back to the every day. I wish it could be done for more games but not all games are created equal. At a basic level you have direct comparisons between game warfare (Chess, Go, Shogi) to real accounts of how to practice warfare (Sun Tzu ‘Art of War’, writings of various generals throughout history). But there is almost certainly a lot of meaning that could be derived from these games and others that doesn’t need to be such a 1:1 comparison. Just a random example of what this could be: how does Frogger help me practice/define/critique frugality?