Don’t lie!   Just admit it, we’ve all been there.   You’ve found yourself absentmindedly opening up Freecell and felt a wash of delicious guilty pleasure in doing so.  You’ve had a really crappy day at work and popped open minesweeper and for those few game time moments; you were at peace with all the chaos of your day.  Some of you even have a nightly Mahjong ritual to clear all the tiles before you would even consider laying your sleepy head down on the pillow. 

How is this even possible? That with such brilliantly engaging RPG’s, intricately realistic FPS games, and stunningly beautiful adventure games, we can still find ourselves with an addiction for such simple, single minded click games?   The prices of console games are dropping; second generation consoles are super inexpensive and a perfectly decent gaming PC isn’t too much of a financial stretch either (unless you want play Crysis :P) and serious gaming is much more accessible for a much wider scope of people.  I have it all and I am constantly in the middle of a new 360 title, my beloved WoW character, or any number of DS, Wii, and PS3 games. Even with the whole shebang at my whim, I am a sucker for a quick game of jawbreaker or minesweeper. 

The simple act of winning a game of solitaire is remarkably satisfying and relaxing!  You quiet out the rest of your mind, escape to place of mental calculation or visual response and finger/eye coordination and fire off those more narrow synapses for a change.     Compared to the body, it’s like a nice relaxing stroll outside for the mind.  I love the hard sweaty run to get in the good-for-your-game cardio, but I’m convinced that a nice stroll in the brain park with a game a day will lower your stress levels and perhaps even your cholesterol! 

So however enthralled you become with your hardcore games and no matter how bad you want that level 70 flying mount, elementary gaming will open its simplistic, relaxing arms and give you big mental hug, and after it’s all said and done you will still feel like achieved something even though it doesn’t show up on your gamertag. 

Does anyone know where you can play good online scrabble, like they used to have on iWin.com? Damn miss that!

Kiss Kiss,

Dawngrrl Gametart

This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 8:10 pm and is filed under Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.