Games People Play

I am not a gamer; as a matter of fact, I don't like playing games. However, I am a recently-retired senior citizen who needs to maintain mental acuity, rather than vegetate, so I turned to Yahoo games for some brain and coordination stimulation. There are several games I enjoy, most recently the Marble Train, which is akin to Zuma, which used to be free but now requires not just a purchase, but a financial and trust commitment to a website that I don't want invading my computer.

This past week, I discovered Yahoo's FITZ!, and it's evil. The directions are generic: match 3 icons to move through the various levels. When the icons are brightly colored, it's easy to see them, but when the colors are gone and the whole page is white on white, it's really, really challenging to discern the various shapes and positions next to one another. I'm always slow as I search the icons for my next move, so the program flashes my next move at me long before I've ruled out further moves on my own! When I take the computer's advice, I have no idea why I didn't see that move myself -- before the computer takes over my game and plays it for me.

At one point, Level Six I believe, I could not get the level completed, although all the tiles except one were white and I had consecutive moves constantly. Of course, one of my moves could result in a dozen computer moves as the icons moved onto the board in an endless stream or only changed by one or two at the top. I finally figured out that I "should have" been able to "do something" to affect the icons surrounding the one that was still colored, but how does that happen?

Luck: there is no skill involved. The computer is programmed and I'm fumbling my way through the icons; of course the computer is going to win. If I win, it's sheer luck because I have no idea what I'm doing, why I'm doing it, or how to do it differently to affect the outcome. I did make it through Level Eight without knowing how to play the game and/or affect the outcome, but that was enough game-play to last me the rest of this lifetime.

A value in playing these games is that the player has to use trial and error to know what to do next time, as well as what not to do. Problem-solving is a mental skill of basing decisions on knowing what works and what does not. However, no matter how often someone else tells, for instance, an employee how to do the job correctly to avoid a costly/ dangerous/ fatal mistake, the employee doesn't learn until s/he does it incorrectly and has to handle the consequences. It may be valuable to teach that lesson in a game, but there is a difference between making endless mistakes in a game that allows a continuous stream of do-overs and making a fatal mistake in real time that changes everything for everyone forever.

Although we encourage ourselves, as well as students and employees, to think outside the box, sometimes, life's answer is "because I said so," rather than an endless stream of options that don't work in a search to find the one that wins the game.