Intelligent adults, contemplating why they play a mindless video game.

Lori Culwell sees the game "Angry Birds" as her "meditation tool" and thinks she's "picked up some sage wisdom from those self-sacrificing birds and their mortal pig enemies. Call it an Angry Birds satori, perhaps."

[T]he birds put my mind into a deeply Zen-like and hypnotic state, not unlike "flow" as described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Maybe the people at Rovio have given us a game that is part meditation, part allegory for life. Maybe Freud would point out that my finding Zen in a game based on pig destruction signals latent anger issues.

("Flow" by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly is one of my very favorite books, as I've noted before.)

And here's William Ian Miller in "Losing It"  — a book I first talked about here — talking about solitaire:

Everything distracts me... I interrupted the writing of this paragraph to play a game of solitaire, and then when I lost I allowed myself to play until I won, and then one more in case I won two in a row, and then I kept on until I won two in a row. Says the ancient rabbinical Pirkei Avot: The Ethics of the Fathers, written some eighteen hundred years ago: “If a man is walking by the way and is studying and then interrupts his study and exclaims: ‘How beautiful is this tree? How beautiful is this plowed furrow?’ Scripture considers that it is to be regarded as if he has forfeited his life (or as if he bears guilt for his soul).” If the beauties of nature cannot justify distraction, what of solitaire? My offense is (as if) capital; if only I could remember which circle of hell awaits me. My will—an element of my name, no less—never strong to begin with, has become weaker. The “I am” that remains in Will -iam is thus a ghost of its former self. If William James is right, and I find that he usually is, then I am in trouble: “The essential achievement of the will, in short, when it is most ‘voluntary,’ is to attend to a difficult object and hold it fast before the mind" (italics in original).

Do you use video games in a way that makes you want to explain it — like Culwell — in terms of meditation and wisdom or — like Miller — to read it as a signpost that you are walking downhill toward the grave?

"Losing It: In which an Aging Professor laments his shrinking Brain..."

That's the name of new book — buy it here — by Michigan lawprof William Ian Miller, who has ripened to the age of 65 years. He gives a fascinating (and not decrepit) interview:

Because we no longer have mandatory retirement, we... must take ourselves out of the game; we have to figure out when we no longer are up to it, no longer worth our salary, no longer wanted, no longer really count for much. How can you rightly read where you stand when your ability to think is decaying at an accelerating pace?...

The book has six parts. The first deals with mental decay.... The second takes on wisdom and casts a fairly jaundiced eye in that direction. What wisdom is to be expected from people whose brains are shrinking, who cannot remember much very well, and who tediously repeat stories, or in the manner of Polonius, give advice the young find boring and manifestly ignorable?...

The third part deals with complaining, the various styles of complaint, such as pissing and moaning, kvetching, lamenting, whining, etc.... The fourth is about retirements from revenge; it is the medieval stuff that got me going on this project.... The fifth part has me dealing with going soft... And last: how to go out in style....

This sounds great. I'm going to read this book. Miller is very sharp, despite his advanced age. You could also read this excerpt from the book if you don't have much time (left).

Miller scoffs at the studies that purport to show that oldies are especially happy folk: "My suspicion is that if there is in fact happiness, it is a symptom of the brain shrinkage that comes with old age, of no longer being able to think very precisely. "