We interviewed Carnegie Mellon professor on games as pleasurable experiences:

You create games for a reason: to be pleasurable. If it’s not pleasurable, you don’t want it. What happened is that people are realizing that game designers know something special. They have special knowledge which other people don’t have, and that could be applied to all kinds of things. What gamification means-it’s not making everything into a game-is understanding what’s wanted. So how do we take this knowledge, and how do we adapt it to things that aren’t games and make those pleasurable?

Then we look at a recent Mensa gathering on the subject of games:

As it turns out, the history of Mensa shows that many Mensans are gamers. Board and card games are traditionally their games of choice, so much so, in fact, that an entire annual event is dedicated to gathering together and testing newly produced games brought by publishers seeking the highly coveted Mensa Select seal. In addition, at their general annual meeting, Mensans have been known to play a popular (among Mensans) intellectual game devised by one of their own, Carnelli. Winning Carnelli requires the ability to make associations rapidly, as well as an almost encyclopedic knowledge base.