Carefully engineered playable games can serve as vehicles for students and practitioners to learn and explore the programming of advanced computer architectures to execute applications, such as high performance computing (HPC) and complex, inter-networked, distributed systems. The article presents families of playable games that are grounded in the concurrent, parallel, and distributed manipulations and processing of sequences. Some examples of such manipulations are games that involve pattern matching, recognition, alignment, transformation, and evolution of sequences.