Hi Neighbour. Wow, am I glad to see the sun! I’ve been spending so much time in front of a screen that’s it’s having an effect on my health! I have great advice for my friends about getting away from screens, but I have a small screen tucked away in my bedroom. Yes, in my bedroom. Know what it is? No, not a cell phone. Not a computer. Not an iPad. A Nintendo Gameboy, given to me by a friend whose son left it behind when he left home, along with the kind of stuff that our grown kids leave behind and expect us to clean up after them.
Well, I love it! And it’s in my side table, for the occasion when I can stay in bed on a rainy morning and play Tetris. Yes, I’m hooked! Ever since a visiting Japanese boy gave me a tiny, 2″ toy, with Tetris on it, and showed me how to play it. If you don’t know what Tetris is, different shapes of blocks ‘fall down’ in a box, and you can fit them into the wall at the bottom. When a row in the wall is completed, it disappears. But more blocks are falling, so you can’t stop or you’ll lose the game, when the wall reaches the top of the box. Rewards, in the form of points, mount up and, when you lose — which you will eventually do — it’s your points that count. Tetris is one of the first Brain Games that females took to, way-back-when, when most video games were geared for boys or grown-up boys. Well, I love Math and anything that has a ‘rhythm’ or mathematical structure, so I got hooked.
Then there’s Sudoku — a numbers game, like a crossword puzzle. Nowadays, you can get so many online brain games that you don’t need to buy those magazines with all kinds of puzzles. When I was in Ghana, I met teachers who had Sudoku on their cell phones, but they didn’t know how to play it… so I taught them. A great conversation piece and a great Ice Breaker. We were all kids again… But the advantage of Sudoku is that, if you use logic and follow simple rules, you’ll get to the solution. No points to rack up — just satisfaction at finishing it. If you have more than 30 clues (= numbers already printed in the squares) it’s a breeze to finish. But if there are less than 25 clues, you’ll need to use a strategy, to finish it… and patience.
There are many kinds of brain games. I have friends who love crosswords. Teachers make word searches to reinforce vocabulary. Magazines and newspapers used to publish puzzles with every edition, right next to the comics. Then video games captured our kids, especially on road trips. Who wants to watch the highway go by! Are we there yet?
Enjoy the sun! Fiona