Quantum Games
Building intuition for the impossible
The problem
Quantum computing could become a multiplier of human capability, but the talent pipeline is impossibly narrow. Globally, there are only about 6,000 physics PhD students at any given time. Half won't graduate. Of those who do, only a fraction enter quantum information science.
But here's the deeper issue: quantum computing won't just need quantum physicists. Just as the internet requires thousands of people across hundreds of layers—from low-level electronic signal engineers to UX designers— quantum technologies will need an entire ecosystem of people with some intuition about quantum concepts.
The conventional approach makes this impossible. Quantum mechanics is taught through advanced mathematics, with students told to "trust the math" and develop private intuitions about what it means. This works for training (a few) physicists. It doesn't work for building an ecosystem.
The insight
Games let people build intuition about abstract concepts through direct experience. You don't need to understand the physics of projectile motion to develop intuition for it: you just need to throw a ball to a child, or enough angry birds at enough pigs.
What if we could do the same for quantum mechanics? Not gamifying learning with points and badges, but learnifying gaming—creating actual games where quantum effects are the core mechanics.
The goal was not to make quantum mechanics fun.
It was to make it inhabitable.
What we built
While building the Google School for Quantum Computing, I started a project called Cheqmate. The core idea was to build tools that enabled a broad set of people to experience quantum. We wanted to get beyond headlines and intimidating language ("spooky", "weird").
Quantum Chess was the first commercial game to run on an actual quantum computer, in partnership with Google's quantum hardware team.
- Quantum Chess — We continued the open-source version of Chris Cantwell's game, where pieces can exist in superposition and become entangled. Players develop intuition for quantum behavior by playing, not by studying equations.
- Unitary — We abstracted the open-source Quantum Chess game engine to make it more generally useful to software developers, focusing on casual game developers in Python.
- Project Qute — Classroom activities for high school students, launched in partnership with Caltech IQIM, the National Q12 Education Partnership, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
- Quantum Forge — When I joined Quantum Realm Games, we revisited the lessons learned building the Unitary library, and rebuilt our internal quantum physics engine and tooling to make it more accessible to professional game developers. This wasn't a simplified teaching tool—it's real quantum mechanics, made interactive.
These weren't just tools—they became the foundation for a growing ecosystem.
How it propagated
The work has appeared in the Bulletin of the American Physical Society. More importantly, high school students are now building intuition for quantum superposition and entanglement—concepts that used to require years of graduate study to grasp.
The community grew to more than 60 contributors globally—university researchers, private individuals, and Googlers—and continues today. When I moved to Quantum Realm Games in 2023, we expanded beyond building games to hosting Quantum Game Jams and consulting for institutional customers like PwC and Moody's Analytics.
The approach is finding its way into formal education: in 2025, Quantum Realm Games and Laguna College of Art and Design launched GA509 Quantum Game Design, training MFA students to use quantum effects as game mechanics.
Together with partners in Europe, I'll host a Lorentz Center Workshop in the Netherlands in September 2026. The workshop will bring together scientists from multiple disciplines to establish research programs in quantum games.
What it demonstrates
I created software, curriculum, and a community that scaled beyond the original team. This work required operating at multiple levels, and with multiple communities, simultaneously. It required enough mastery of quantum mechanics to know what could be made playable, design sensibility to steer engaging games (not educational software), and technical infrastructure that could scale beyond any single team.
It's work well-suited to under-specified problems: "Make quantum mechanics accessible" could have led anywhere. The game-based approach only emerged from asking what would actually work, not what existing solutions looked like.