Abstract: Today’s lattice QCD program, developed over decades, provides celebrated quantitative insight into nonperturbative physics, for example, via ab initio hadron spectroscopy. The entire computational framework, however, is based on importance sampling of the imaginary-time path integral—a method that is infected by sign problems for various calculations of interest. By contrast, it turns out that imaginary time and path integrals are not the natural language for simulation by quantum computers; rather, quantum simulation is well suited to Hamiltonian dynamics in real time. Recent progress in quantum technology has thus ignited interest in the relatively unexplored Hamiltonian methods of lattice (gauge) field theory. I will introduce lattice field theory and its Hamiltonian framework, with a focus on gauge theories and the interesting features that arise in the course of “digitizing” them for simulation. I will further advocate our “loop-string-hadron” formulation as a way to digitize strictly gauge-invariant degrees of freedom with potential cost-saving benefits.