A 93-year-old woman sits in a hospital bed. Facing her is a figure in a full hazmat suit, complete with goggles and latex gloves. Between them lie some cards: they are playing a game. It’s July 2020. The older woman, a grandmother, has Covid. She also has Alzheimer’s.

Her move from a nursing home to the isolated ward at the Sahmyook medical centre in Seoul has left her exhausted, confused and lonely. Her only human contact since her arrival has been with the nurses who bring her food and check her vitals.

The figure in the hazmat suit is a nurse, 29-year-old Lee Su-ryun. It was her colleague’s idea to help elderly patients struggling with isolation by playing Go-Stop, a popular Korean card game that uses the “hwatu” (flower battle) deck.

The players say little. The grandmother is short of breath, and tired. Her tiredness – and the sudden change in routine – exacerbates her dementia; she finds it hard to follow complex conversations, or even remember where she is. The nurse too is tired, having found herself thrust on to the frontlines of an unprecedented global health crisis. She and her colleagues work long hours under extreme, often traumatising, conditions, fighting a virus for which – at this point – there is not yet a vaccine, nor a cure. Go-Stop is a language they both understand. The cards have no numbers or special text – just simple, bold pictures of butterflies and peonies, crashing thunder, a crane among the pines.

One year later, a photograph of their game enjoyed minor viral fame in South Korea. It encapsulates, I think, how a game can be at once mundane and magical. A game, according to the philosopher Bernard Suits, is “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles”. We play, not because it’s useful, but because we want to.

I love games. For me, play is one of the most beautiful, valuable expressions of our humanity. My inner Calvinist protests that this cannot possibly be true. Discipline, sacrifice, responsibility: these are our highest, most virtuous states. Granted, they’re not easy – they may even feel unpleasant – but they lead us to a better place. They are an expression of love. Games, by implication, are self-indulgent vices, without meaning or dignity.

For centuries, apologists have attempted to justify our natural desire for play by sneakily rebranding games as a means of refuelling for more work. Puritan clergyman Thomas Wilcox claimed games could be a way “to refreshe our Spirites, dulled or overwhelmed with some labours or studies … that wee maie afterwardes … more joyfully and cheerfully give our selves over to that callyng, wherein it hath pleased God to sette us”.

Today, I frequently see articles attempting something similar by emphasising “the secret benefits of playing games” (I’ve even written them myself). Games teach children numeracy and social skills, they help busy professionals stave off burnout, they have powerful neuroprotective properties for elderly people, and so on.

The evidence for this is mixed. Take the common assertion that learning chess makes you smarter. Back in the 1920s, Russian psychologists Djakow, Petrowski and Rudik subjected the era’s top chess players to a battery of tests to see if they were smarter than their non-chess-playing peers. Sure enough, their subjects performed better – when the task was related to chess. In tests related to general intelligence, they showed no advantage.

In his book The Grasshopper, Bernard Suits inveighs against the position of “radical instrumentalism” – the idea that every game is “essentially an instrument for some further purpose”. We cannot defend games purely as ways to achieve some practical objective – hidden or otherwise – because games are a bad means of doing so. “If playing a game is regarded as not essentially different from going to the office or writing a cheque, then there is certainly something absurd or paradoxical or, more plausibly, simply something stupid about game playing.”

Justifying play on the grounds that it is, secretly, work – because it improves our creativity, numeracy, diplomatic skills, problem-solving abilities or protects us against mental breakdown – assumes that work is self-evidently meaningful and the true purpose of human life.

On the contrary, says Suits, we work only because circumstances force us to work. Work is worthwhile because it prevents us from starving, or helps us discover treatments for diseases, or builds shelter from the elements. But this is only a moral good if there is some other, greater purpose to our lives, otherwise our efforts just prolong meaninglessness. Work is a form of preventive medicine, and thus not an end in itself. Its ultimate goal is its own extinction.

Game playing, he asserts, is the fundamental concern of utopian existence. It is “precisely what economically and psychologically autonomous individuals would find themselves doing, and perhaps the only things they would find themselves doing”.

Claiming playing games delays Alzheimer’s or makes you better at maths is like saying sex burns calories. It may be true, but if it’s your main motivation, I fear you’re missing the point. “No!” stormed the 19th-century poet and dramatist Théophile Gautier, inveighing against those who claimed art must serve some greater social purpose. “Fools and cretins that you are, a book cannot be turned into a bowl of soup; a novel is not a pair of boots; a sonnet is not a syringe; a drama is not a railroad … By all the bowels of all Popes, past, present and future, no! Ten thousand times, no!”

Games are an invitation to break free from the tyranny of efficiency. Play matters precisely because it is unnecessary. We play because we love joy, and we love feeling free. We play because the experience – including the delicious, squeezing frustration of a dilemma, or the shock of a betrayal – expands our sense of self.

When I play Uno with my daughter, I’m not optimising her for the workplace. We’re dancing. Playing games gives me back to myself. It repairs me and centres me like nothing else. It’s totally unnecessary. It’s magic.

The Game Changers: How Playing Games Changed the World and Can Change You Too by Tim Clare is published by Canongate (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Further reading

Return of the Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia by Bernard Suits (Routledge, £36.99)

Seven Games: A Human History by Oliver Roeder (WW Norton & Co, £14.99)

Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal (Vintage, £12.99)